Classes of Individual Growth Trajectories of Religious Coping in Older Adulthood: Patterns and Predictors

For many individuals, religion provides important cognitive resources for coping with stressors, especially in older adulthood. Although older adults are thought to make more use of these coping strategies than those at younger ages, less is known about how patterns of use change during the span of older adulthood. In a largely Christian sample of U.S. older adults, positive and negative religious coping were measured between 2 and 5 times over a period of 11 years (N = 1,075). Growth mixture modeling extracted latent classes of growth. The optimal solution for positive coping indicated a five-class structure (high, stable; high, declining moderately; high, declining rapidly; low, increasing; and low, stable) and the optimal negative coping solution had three classes (low, declining; low, increasing; and high, declining). Nominal logistic regression examined the relationship of individual characteristics with latent class. Education, religious commitment, religious attendance, and religious doubt were related to positive coping trajectory class. Only religious doubt was related to negative coping class.