Yen Le, L. Mickey Fenzel, Ph.D., Jill L. Snodgrass, Ph.D., Thanh V. Tran, Ph.D.

Acculturative Stress and Coping Processes among Middle-aged Vietnamese-born American Catholics: The Roles of Spirituality, Religiosity, and Resilience on Well-Being

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Abstract:

This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional design to examine the relationship of acculturative stress, spirituality, religiosity, and resilience on psychological distress and life satisfaction for Vietnamese American immigrants. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop a multidimensional coping framework, namely the Transactional Model of Acculturative Stress and Coping Process, as a way of understanding and intervening for clinicians to work with people going through midlife experiences and/or midlife crises associated with the experience of being an immigrant. Participants in this study were 413 middle-aged Vietnamese-born American Catholics. Results from the zero-order correlation analyses indicated that depression and life satisfaction were significantly related to spirituality, religiosity, resilience, and five personality traits; but it did not correlate with acculturative stress. A series of hierarchical multiple regressions examined the main effects and interaction effects of spirituality, religiosity, and resilience when controlling for gender, religious status, language, years since immigration, and five personality traits. Results demonstrated that no main effect for acculturative stress and no significant interactive effects in predicting depression and life satisfaction were found. Religious Involvement, Religious Crisis, and Resilience in Midlife predicted significantly depression and life satisfaction over these other variables (ΔR2 scores ranged from .01 to .04). These findings provided further support for the hypotheses that religiosity and resilience are important resources for managing psychological distress and enhancing life satisfaction for Vietnamese-born American Catholic immigrants at midlife. Implications for counseling practice and future research were discussed.

Keywords: Spirituality, religiosity, personality, stress, resilience, immigrant, midlife