Abstract
We examined the relation between preference for religious help-seeking and defensive theology, interfaith intolerance, spiritual conceptualisations of mental health problems, race/ethnicity, and gender in a predominantly Christian sample of 389 college students. MANOVA revealed significant main effects for race/ethnicity, with African American participants showing higher scores than Caucasians and Latinos/as across all main study variables. Follow-up ANOVA yielded main effects for race across all four variables and main effects for gender on spiritual conceptualisation of mental health problems and defensive theology. All race/ethnicity by gender interactions were nonsignificant. Preference for religious help-seeking was regressed in a hierarchical manner on race/ethnicity and gender, followed by interfaith intolerance, defensive theology, and spiritual conceptualisation of mental health problems. A statistically significant model explaining 46% of the variance emerged incorporating all variables except race. A framework for understanding help-seeking preference is presented, followed by directions for future research.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to express sincere thanks to Sherzine McKenzie and Matthew Light for their assistance with this project.
Notes
Note: Within each variable, row values with different subscripts differ significantly and column values with different superscripts differ significantly
Notes: aRace Variable 1: African American = 1, Non-Hispanic White and Latino = 0.
bRace Variable 2: Latino = 1, African American and White Non-Hispanic = 0.
cGender: Female = 0 and Male = 1.
*p ≤ .05