Gender, race, and the use of prayer to manage anger

ABSTRACT

Women and blacks are more likely than men and whites to use prayer to manage negative emotions such as anger. However, the pathways explaining these associations are not fully understood. Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey’s emotion module, we evaluate four potential mechanisms that might account for these associations: women’s and blacks’ relatively high levels of religious participation, relatively low socioeconomic status, extended duration of their negative emotional experiences, and relatively lower perceived control. Women’s and blacks’ higher likelihood of using prayer to manage anger is partially accounted for by their higher levels of religious participation, lower socioeconomic status, and duration of anger. Lower levels of perceived control contribute only to blacks’ use of prayer to manage anger. Our findings highlight the importance of identifying pathways that explain why particular social groups use particular emotion management strategies.

Acknowledgments

We thank Phillip Brenner and three anonymous reviewers for advice on improving the manuscript.

Notes

¹To check for multicollinearity, we conducted analyses to calculate the tolerance of how much collinearity a model can tolerate and the variance inflation factor, an indicator of how much the standard errors are caused by collinearity. The tolerance levels for all the variables included in the analysis were well above 0.1, and the variance inflation factor for all variables was well below 10, indicating that multicollinearity is not a concern.

²Zero-order correlations among all the model variables are available upon request.

³Around 70% of evangelical Protestants report praying once a week or more, whereas around 53% of mainline Protestants and Catholics report praying once a week or more.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shane Sharp

Shane Sharp is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Graduate Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research examines the social psychological basis of religious beliefs and practices.

Deborah Carr

Deborah Carr is Professor of Sociology at The State University of New Jersey–Rutgers. Her research examines sociology of the life course, aging, social psychology, and gender.

Kathryn Panger

Kathryn Panger is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California at Davis. She is interested in commitment to religious organizations.