Скачать или смотреть Religion and Mental Health: Is the Relationship Causal?

SUMMARY: The presentation will consider associations between religious service attendance and subsequent depression, suicide, and anxiety using data from several large longitudinal cohort studies. Critical attention will be given to the question of whether the associations provide evidence for causal relationships. Methodological and statistical challenges will be discussed including study design, the possibility of reverse causation, approaches to assessing mechanisms, and potential robustness to confounding. Discussion will be given to the public health and clinical implications of the research.


PRESENTER: Tyler J. VanderWeele, Ph.D., is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program and Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics. His methodological research is focused on theory and methods for distinguishing between association and causation in the biomedical and social sciences and, more recently, on psychosocial measurement theory. His empirical research spans psychiatric and social epidemiology; the science of happiness and flourishing; and the study of religion and health. He is the recipient of the 2017 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He has published over three hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals; is author of the books Explanation in Causal Inference (2015), Modern Epidemiology (2021), and Measuring Well-Being (2021); and he also writes a monthly blog posting on topics related to human flourishing for Psychology Today.