66
Relationship between Religious Attitude and
Happiness among Professional Employees
Mojtaba Aghili and G. Venkatesh Kumar
University of Mysore, Mysore.
This article is part of a larger project, which investigated the relationship between
religious attitude and subjective well being among Iranian and Indian professional
employees. The present article focused on feeling of happiness among Iranian
population. The sample consists 1491 employees of which 744 were males and
747 were female. Religious attitude was measured by using Rajmanickam’s
Religious Attitude Scale and happiness was measure with The Oxford Happiness
Questionnaire by Hills & Argyle. The main findings of the present study were
that all the subscales of and total religious attitude were found to be highly
correlated with Happiness. Higher the religious attitude, higher was the
happiness. Further correlations revealed that higher the happiness more was
future life and spirits and spirit world and lastly, happiness though significantly
related, less correlated with formal religion aspect of religious attitude.
Keywords: Religious Attitude, Happiness, Spirituality, Prayer and Worship
Psychology of religion is the discipline that
studies religion and religious phenomena
using psychological theories, concepts, and
methods. This discipline considers religion
as influenced by psychological realities and
as having an impact on theses realities.
Within the psychology of religion domain
there has been increasing interest to furnish
the theoretical perspective with empirical
support. One such approach is empirical
interest in examining the relationship between
religion and happiness. With respect to the
empirical examination of the relationship
between religion and happiness, traditionally
the results of these studies have been mixed,
with some providing consistent support for a
positive association (lnglehart, 1990; Moberg
& Taves. 1965; Mookerjee & Beron, 2005;
Veenhoven, 1994; Witter, Stock, Okun, &
Haring, 1985; Zuckerman, Kas & Ostfeld,
1984), while others have not (e.g., Abdel-
Khalek & Nacuer, 2006; Blazer & Palmore,
1970; Brinkerhoff & Mackie, 1993; Heisel &
Faulkner, 1982; Janssen, Banziger, Dezutter,
& Hutsebaut, 2006; McNamara & St George,
1978; Poloma & Pendleton, 1989, 1990,
1991; Shaver, Lenauer, & Sadd, 1980;Tellis-
Nayak, 1982; Yates, Chalmer, St James,
Follansbee, & McKegney, 1981). However,
such findings are difficult to integrate, as
previous research has employed a variety of
different measures of both religiosity including
measures of religious attitude, religious
experience, religious conversion, and
religious behavior, and happiness including
both single-item and multi-item scales, among
a variety of different samples.
Subjective well-being (SWB) is the field
in the behavioral sciences in which people’s
evaluations of their lives are studied. SWB
includes diverse concepts ranging from
momentary moods to global judgments of life
satisfaction, and from depression to
euphoria. The field has grown rapidly in the
last decade, so that there are now thousands
of studies on topics such as life satisfaction
and happiness. Jahoda (1958) called for the
inclusion of positive states in definitions of
wellbeing, which sparked a paradigmatic shift
© Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology,
April 2008, Vol. 34, Special Issue, 66-69.