Religio‐Biography, Coping, and Meaning‐Making Among Persons with HIV/AIDS

Recently, quality of life studies among patients with HIV/AIDS have shown high levels of life satisfaction. Spiritual and religious factors may contribute to these positive outcomes. We interviewed 19 patients with HIV/AIDS in order to understand better the role of religious‐spiritual biographies and orientations in quality of life, and found four patterns to describe the ways in which past experiences with religion/spirituality and religious/spiritual meaning‐making help to explain how patients are currently coping with HIV/AIDS. We illustrate each of these patterns with a prototypic patient: (1) the Deferring Believer (“God allows things to happen for a reason.”); (2) the Collaborating Believer (“This is where I'm supposed to be.”); (3) the Religious/Spiritual Seeker (“I'm trying to get my life together.”); and (4) the Self‐Directing Believer (“What else is new?”). The findings support a previously described theoretical model of meaning‐making in response to adversity, and they suggest the value of life course and narrative approaches to understanding religious coping.