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The study examines patterns of religious involvement, health status, functional disability, and depression among noninstitutionalized elderly residents of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982. Controlling for demographic variables and physical health status, cross-sectional analysis of data from the Yale Health and Aging Project (N= 2811) shows higher levels of public religious involvement associated with lower levels of functional disability and depressive symptomatology; among men the analysis also shows that private religious involvement modifies the associations of health status with disability, and disability with depression. Four alterntive explanatory hypotheses with roots in classical sociological theories of religion are proposed and tested, three arguments for indirect effects of religious involvement through health behaviors, social cohesiveness, and cognitive coherence, and one for an interactive theodicy effect. Most research on the effects of social networks and social support on health status has barely begun to exploit the fact that neither networks nor support are evenly dispersed throughout people's social environments. Rather, they are found clustered together in social institutions which are frequently made up of nonintersecting networks and which offer substantively different kinds of support. Available epidemiological research, however, has tended to treat these social resources in the two simplest possi*An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1986 meetings of the American Sociological Association. Financial support for the analysis was provided by a U.S. Public Health Service Predoctoral Traineeship Grant 5 T32 MH15783-04, and a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation. I am indebted to Lisa F. Berkman, Adrian M. Ostfeld, Stanislav Kasl, and the Establishment of Populations for Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (EPESE) Project of the National Institute on Aging for allowing me to use data from the Yale Health and Aging Project, and to Lisa F. Berkman, Jerome Myers, Allan Horwitz, Stephen Hansell, David Mechanic, and an anonymous referee for their comments. Address correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology, Lucy Stone Hall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. C 1987 The University of North Carolina Press
Ellen Idler (Tue,) studied this question.