Exploring the Relationship between Religious/Spiritual Coping Practices and Adaptation to an Aquired Physical Disability

This dissertation study sought to examine the extent to which both positive and negative religious/spiritual (R/S) coping practices predict adaptation to an acquired chronic illness or disability (CID). The predictive capacities of positive and negative R/S coping practices were evaluated after accounting for demographic variables, duration of disability, social support, and organizational religious activity. To gather data, a national sample of adults with physical disabilities was surveyed via Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Statistical analyses of relationships between variables were performed by running bivariate tests and generating two hierarchical multiple regression models. Results of the study indicated that higher educational attainment, higher yearly household income, and greater social support each significantly related to better adaptation to disability. Heightened negative R/S coping correlated inversely with adaptation. The output of a three-phase regression model showed that over and above educational attainment, yearly household income, and social support, negative R/S coping increased the explained variance in adaption by 10.8%. In fact, negative R/S coping proved to be the most powerful single predictor of adaptation in the model. Altogether, this four-factor model accounted for 39.5% of the variance in adaptation to CID. In a second three-phase regression model, the addition of positive R/S coping to demographic and social support factors did not alter the explained variance in adaptation outcomes. Results of this investigation will contribute to rehabilitation psychologists' knowledge about the relationship between positive and negative R/S coping practices and adaptation to CID. Such knowledge may assist rehabilitation practitioners in structuring screening and intervention efforts so as to reduce harmful R/S coping responses to CID onset and promote more adaptive R/S coping patterns.