Religious Coping and Trait Aggression in an Active-Duty Military Sample of Self-Identified Christians.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The present study examined self-reported religiousness, religious-coping methods (positive and negative), and trait aggression among 55 active-duty, military men and women, all of whom were church-going and self-identified as Christian. All participants completed the Duke Religion Index (DUREL; Koenig, Parkerson, & Meador, 1997), the Brief RCOPE (Pargament, Smith, Koenig, & Perez, 1998), and the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ; Buss & Perry, 1992). It was hypothesized that trait aggression would be negatively related to the use of positive religious-coping methods and positively related to the use of negative religious-coping methods.
Hypotheses were not supported, and possible explanations for the study's null results were explored. Such potential explanations included the possibility that military personnel may reflect a subset of the religious community that has achieved internal peace with regards to some forms of aggression. An alternative explanation was that frequent utilization of religious coping may contribute to overall decreases in trait aggression, thereby leading individuals who regularly use religious coping to avoid careers that require frequent engagement in aggressive behavior.
Of note, in the current study, a significant negative correlation was found between the number of years in active military service and the level of self-reported trait aggression. Also, intrinsic religiosity was positively related to both positive religious-coping methods and negative religious-coping methods.
For the current study, several limitations need to be taken into account, namely the low sample size and the use of both a nonrepresentative convenience-sample and self-report questionnaires. Future research should replicate this study with larger and more representative samples, and it should perhaps include different measures and a mixed-method design, to more robustly assess trait aggression within a military population.
Keywords: military, religiousness, religion, Christian, religious coping, aggression.