Ninety-seven couples completed questionnaires about their involvement in joint religious activities and their perceptions regarding the sanctification of marriage, including perceived sacred qualities of marriage and beliefs about the manifestation of God in marriage. In contrast to individual religiousness and religious homogamy (distal religious constructs), these proximal religious variables directly reflect an integration of religion and marriage, and they were associated with greater global marital adjustment, more perceived benefits from marriage, less marital conflict, more verbal collaboration, and less use of verbal aggression and stalemate to discuss disagreements for both wives and husbands. The proximal measures also added substantial unique variance (adjusted R 2 change ranged from .06 to .48) to specific aspects of marital functioning after controlling demographic factors and distal religious variables in hierarchical regression analyses.

In light of our results, we conclude with a discussion of innovative means of engaging students with ageing content/populations, and suggestions for overcoming staffing and placement shortcomings.

The BRIGHTEN Program demonstrated that an interdisciplinary virtual team linked with outpatient medical clinics can be an effective, nonthreatening, and seamless approach to enable older adults to access treatment for depression.

Most older adults report using religion as a resource in coping with the many challenges of late life. Until recently, our understanding of religion in coping was limited by studies utilizing unidimensional measures of religion, which did little to explain the power that religion seems to have for so many people. More recently, multiple facets of religious coping have been explored, along with the implications of their use for many populations, including older adults. In this paper, we examine approaches to conceptualization and measurement of religious coping as they relate to the challenges of late life. We consider some of the social, situational, and personal factors that shape the character of religious coping. We also review the literature on links between forms of religious coping and measures of health and well-being for older adults. Finally, we review recent efforts to incorporate religion and spirituality into psychological interventions, and discuss implications of religious factors in late life for a variety of professionals in gerontology.Whether they follow a life-long pattern of religiousness or move toward religion in late life, the large majority of older adults incorporate religion and/ or spirituality into their coping repertoire (Koenig, 1990). Perhaps this should not be altogether surprising, for many of the unique challenges of late life lend themselves to religious coping. And, although some religious coping strategies lead to poorer outcomes, most older adults find strength and solace in religion (Koenig, 1990). In this paper, we explore religious coping as a resource for the elderly. We examine the ways religious coping is conceptualized and measured and, in the process, challenge stereotypes of religion as a unidimensional phenomena. We briefly consider some of the social, situational, and personal factors that shape religious coping, and present studies that demonstrate links between religious coping and health and well-being in later life.

The evaluation tool has both strengths and limitations. We discuss future directions for its ongoing validation and professional use.