Research on spirituality/religion a

Research on spirituality/religion and health crosses many disciplines and areas of specialization. Scientific disciplines often use different approaches in the design of studies and analysis of data. The same body of research can lead to quite different conclusions, depending on the qualitative or meta-analytic strategy used to distill findings. One area of diversity is in statistical control of spiritual/ religious variables in health research (an issue not unique to this area, of course). We contrast two different approaches to statistical control as a context for the articles that follow. Depending on which of these approaches one adopts, it would be possible to reach quite different conclusions about the relationship between spirituality/religiousness and health.