Religiosity and general health among undergraduate students: a response to O'Connor, Cobb, and O'Connor (2003)

To extend the work of O'Connor et al. (2003), a sample of 246 undergraduate students completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity together with the thirty-item version of the General Health Questionnaire and measures of church attendance, personal prayer, and bible reading. The data demonstrate that a positive attitude toward Christianity is associated with a higher level of self-reported general health. Church attendance and personal prayer convey no additional predictive power after attitude toward Christianity has been taken into account. These findings contradict those of O'Connor et al. (2003) and are sufficiently important to deserve replication among other samples.