Lately the social situation in Indonesia is not conducive enough for the welfare of the people. The crises occur in a few aspects of life (such as economic and political) have consequences for the Indonesian people. The group who has the chance to change this condition is the emerging adults who are highly educated, such as university students. Actually this is an additional burden for them, besides dealing with the questions about work, love and ideology (including religiosity), which is things about ideology or religiosity is important because it was a part of identity development. They can explore their lives much more than before, but they should do it carefully because it will affect their future.
Religiosity is not only a question or a problem for them, but also a kind of coping strategy, which they can use to solve their problems. The differences of religious strategy of coping with other ways of coping are the involvement of religion that can give a pleasant feeling, stimulating personal growth, increasing the relationship with God, finding self-identity and dealing with the problems (Pargament, 1995). People who are religious have a healthier emotional life (Ellis in Koenig, Larson and Larson, 2001). This can be optimised if the individual has a thorough understanding about their lives. Larson & Larson (2003) said that religiosity has a negative effect on physical and mental health condition.
This research examined the relationship between religious coping and quality of life with quantitative method and used 173 subjects. Religious coping was measured by RCOPE (Pargament, 2000) with two domains (positive and negative religious coping). The Quality of Life (QoL) was measured by WHOQOL-SRPB (2002) with six domains (physical, psychological, level of independence, social relationship, environment and SRPB (spiritual, religiosity and personal beliefs). Researcher uses Pearson Product Moments and if there is any significant relationship, will be continued by General Linear Modelling to look at the contribution of religious coping on QoL . This statistical method was used for each domain because both variables didn?t have a total score. Consequently, researcher developed 12 hypotheses. The hypotheses could be divided into two parts. Firstly, for positive religious coping: there are positive significant correlations between positive religious coping and each domain of QoL. Secondly, for negative religious coping: there are negative significant correlations between negative religious coping and each domain of QoL.
Researcher found that there are positive correlations between positive religious coping and QoL even though not all of them are positive and significant. In addition, there are negative correlations between negative religious coping with each domain of QoL. The results might be influenced by another variables, such as: (1) the perception of uncontrollability that can have an impact on mental health and other psychological aspects like depression (Rothbaum, Weisz & Snyder in Propst, 1982), (2) self-efficacy that can determine people?s paradigms, feeling, motivation and behaviours (Bandura, 1994) and optimism that have an important role in adapting to the stressful condition (Scheier, Carver & Bridges in Brissette, Scheier & Carver, 2002).
Furthermore, positive religious coping offers perceived social support in a positive way and vice versa. Moreover, perceived social support can reduce stress and depression and can increase the quality of life (Brissette, et.al., 2002). Not all of those hypotheses shows significant correlations. It could be explained by perceived social support. Religious coping offers some support, especially in spirituality, comfort (Porter & Stone, 1999) and intimacy (Buber in Pargament et.al., 2000). However, not everyone could see it in that way. It depends on his or her perceptions. If they feel they have some kind of support they can have a better quality of life (Brissette, Scheier |