Divine struggles and whole person functioning: a 9-year longitudinal study of middle-aged U.S. adults

This longitudinal study examined the associations of divine struggles with 25 psychological distress, psychological well-being, social well-being, prosociality, physical health, and health behavior outcomes assessed approximately nine years later.

We used three waves of data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (N = 4041): M1 (1995-1996), M2 (2004-2006), and M3 (2013-2014). Following the analytic template for outcome-wide longitudinal designs, our primary analysis employed a series of regression models to estimate the associations between a continuous measure of divine struggles assessed at M2 with each outcome assessed at M3. All models adjusted for a rich set of covariates, including prior values of all outcomes.

There was modest evidence suggesting that divine struggles were associated with worse subsequent functioning on one or more outcomes for each domain except health behaviors (effect sizes were generally very small).

Divine struggles have the potential to degrade long-term functioning across multiple domains of life. Practitioners should attend to and address divine struggles in their clinical work.