Subjective well-being and religiosity: significant associations among college students from Egypt and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Previous research, mostly on Western samples, indicates that religiosity is associated with lowered anxiety. The objective of this study was to explore the associations between religiosity and subjective well-being (SWB): happiness, satisfaction with life, and mental health in Egyptian and British samples. Samples of 220 Egyptian and 205 British college students were recruited.

The results indicated that Egyptians obtained the high mean score on religiosity, whereas British had the high SWB mean scores. All the correlations between the self-rating scales in both samples were statistically significant and positive. A single component was extracted and labelled ‘SWB and religiosity’ in both countries. Despite the large differences between the Egyptian and British samples in both the mean scale scores and culture, the results of the correlations and the component were similar. On the basis of the responses of the current two samples, it was concluded that those who consider themselves as religious experienced greater well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjective well-being
• happiness
• satisfaction with life
• mental health
• religiosity
• Egypt
• United Kingdom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek has a PhD in psychology (Alexandria University). He is a Professor Emeritus at Alexandria University, Egypt. He has taught courses on different branches in psychology in five Arab Universities in Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. He is interested in research on personality assessment and lexicons, abnormal psychology, death anxiety, death obsession, positive psychology, mental health, and health psychology. His publication record contains more than 380 articles, chapters (in Arabic or English) and 24 books, as well as more than 50 presentations in several conferences around the world.

David Lester has a PhD (Brandeis University) in psychology and a PhD (Cambridge University) in social and political science. He is a Professor Emeritus at Stockton University, New Jersey, USA. He has taught courses on abnormal psychology, personality, psychological testing, and theories of counseling. Lester has been involved in suicidology since 1964 and was elected President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP). Lester is a leading expert on telephone counseling and has co-editing three editions of Crisis Intervention and Counseling by Telephone, most recently with James Rogers. Lester is known as one of the most prolific psychologists in the world for his publication record of more than 2,500 notes, articles and chapters and more than 100 books. He has collaborated with fellow experts from Austria to Zimbabwe.