Praying and coping: The relation between varieties of praying and religious coping styles

Abstract

This study focuses on different varieties of prayer in relation to different coping styles. A total of 337 Dutch and Flemish people answered a questionnaire comprising Pargament's Religious Coping Scale, a Receptivity Coping Scale, and a Dutch prayer inventory. Three types of prayer were distinguished: the religious, the petitionary, and the meditative prayer. The first two are typically traditional, involving a classical image of a personal God, while the third is modern, focusing on the self rather than on God. This is a distinction that applies more or less to the three coping styles of Pargament as well as to the Receptivity Scale. Pargament's religious coping styles, i.e., the collaborative and the deferring coping styles, assume the presence of an active and personal God, a view lacking in the Receptive coping styles. Based on this resemblance, an analysis of the relationship between coping styles and the varieties of prayer was made, which showed the following: (1) a relation was found between religious prayer and the collaborative and deferring coping styles; (2) a relation was also found between meditative prayer and the Receptive coping styles; and (3) no relation was found between petitionary prayer and the deferring style.

Notes

Notes

[1] With regard to the effectiveness of praying, we would like to bring forward the so-called intercessory prayer studies. During these studies, an organized prayer group prays on behalf of an experimental group of patients, but not for the control group. The outcomes of these studies showed that the intercessory prayers have a positive effect on the health of the experimental group. This would “prove” the existence of divine intervention. However, aside from the rather questionable goal of proving the existence of divine intervention or God, a recent Cochrane Review (Roberts, Ahmed, & Hall, 2005) stated that the outcomes are too inconclusive to uphold the conclusion that intercessory prayers have a positive effect.

[2] Six open-ended questions were administered: “what is prayer to you?”, “where do you pray?”, “when do you pray?”, “how do you pray?”, “when do you feel the need to pray?”, and “what do you hope to achieve by praying?” As a result of using this (self-reporting) method, the first question, which addresses the definition of praying, achieved a broad range of answers, varying from typically traditional definitions of praying in line with the Christian doctrines to very individual practices which may deviate from the Christian doctrine fundamentally. However, for the very reason that we are interested in the self-reported definitions, we included all the answers in our data.

[3] It should be mentioned that the present sample is more religiously orientated than the Dutch population. In a nationwide survey (SOCON, N = 1008; Eisinga et al., 2002) conducted in 2000, 62% of the respondents prayed, and 38% never prayed. In the present sample, 69% of the people pray, and 31% never pray. Furthermore, 39% of the Dutch population consider themselves to be (Christian) church members, and 49% attend church. The present sample shows 48% and 54%, respectively. The reason why the present sample is more religiously orientated may be due to the fact that a greater part of the sample consists of (Christian) Flemish people and theology students.

[4] The responses to the open-ended questions of the participants were analysed with Textable, a computer program for content analysis of open-ended answers in large data sets. It involves several steps: Textable constructs a list of all the words, arranged in order of frequency. Then, synonyms are gathered in word strings. This procedure results in a list of content categories in which the whole takes on the shape of a tree diagram, ranging from numerous words to many synonyms, followed by fewer content categories and ending in structural elements or ordered categories. Finally, these results can be transported to the closed SPSS data set containing numeric information. Subsequently, a factor analysis was performed on all content categories, resulting in four factors, representing the four prayer varieties.