Krause, N., & Bastida, E. (2011). Religion, suffering, and self-rated health among older mexican americans. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 66B(2), 207–216, doi:10.1093/geronb/gbq086. Advance Access published on November 12, 2010.

A rapidly growing literature suggests that greater involve-ment in religion is associated with better physical health, better mental health, greater longevity, and the adop-tion of beneficial health behaviors (see Oman & Thoresen, 2005 for a review of this research). And as Levin (2001) points out, a good deal of this research has focused specifi-cally on older people. One of the key findings in this litera-ture reveals that old African Americans appear to derive greater the health-related benefits from religion than older Whites (Taylor, Chatters, & Levin, 2004). However, little is known about the relationship between religion and health in other racial and ethnic groups. This is especially true with respect to older Mexican Americans. The lack of attention to the relationship between religion and health among older Mexican Americans is unfortunate because recent demo-graphic projections suggest that older Hispanics will soon overtake older African Americans to become the second largest minority group of older adults in the United States (Federal Interagency Forum on Aging Related Statistics, 2004). The research that has been done so far with older Mexi-can Americans suggests that greater involvement in religion appears to convey greater health benefits (e.g., Reyes-Ortiz, Berges, Koenig, Keo, & Markides, 2008), but the measures of religion that have been used in these studies are crude. In fact, the wide majority of investigators rely solely on the frequency of church attendance to assess religion (e.g., Hill, Burdette, Ellison, & Musick, 2006). Although this is a rea-sonable place to start, researchers have known for some time that religion is a complex multidimensional phenome-non that should be measured with a battery of different indi