Religious and Spiritual Struggle among Indonesian Students: Who Struggle More, Males or Females?

DOI

10.2991/iciap-18.2019.28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

religiousness, religious and spiritual struggles, gender differences, Indonesia, Christian universities

Abstract

Previous studies in the West have found that gender impacts upon religiousness. However, religiousness is also affected by culture, and several studies in Indonesia found no gender effect. This study investigates whether there is a gender effect on another aspect of religion, called religious and spiritual struggle. The Four Basic Dimensions of Religiousness Scale (4BDRS) and Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RS/S) were distributed to 153 students from two Christian universities in Jakarta and Tangerang area, Indonesia. The results showed that there were no gender differences in religiousness (p>.05). However, there were gender differences in religious and spiritual struggle (t (151) = 2.82, p<.01), male students (M=53.65, SD=14.41, N=80) reported significantly higher religious/spiritual struggles than female students (M=47.48, SD=12.48, N=73). Thus, even though male and female students show the same degree of religiousness, male students might be struggling religiously more than their female counterparts. The specific culture of Indonesia that allows more overlapping roles between men and women might explain the absence of gender differences in the religiousness of Indonesian Christian students. However, men and women respond and cope differently with strain, which in turn causes a higher degree of R/S struggle in male students. Understanding such gender similarities and differences could be crucial in shaping the implementation of religious education in schools and universities.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ihan Martoyo
AU  - Yonathan Aditya
AU  - Riryn Sani
AU  - Rudi Pramono
PY  - 2019/08
DA  - 2019/08
TI  - Religious and Spiritual Struggle among Indonesian Students: Who Struggle More, Males or Females?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intervention and Applied Psychology (ICIAP 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 329
EP  - 337
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iciap-18.2019.28
DO  - 10.2991/iciap-18.2019.28
ID  - Martoyo2019/08
ER  -