This study assesses religious coping and church-based social support as mechanisms explaining religious benefits to mental health. We build on recent research and test an explanatory model using the 1998 General Social Survey. The model considers both institutional and individual aspects of religiousness, and their interrelations, as predictors of mental health outcomes. It considers negative effects of religion along with the well-known positive effects. We found that benefits of attendance, a measure of institutional participation, are mediated by church-based social support. Benefits of prayer, an individual form of religiousness, are mediated by the similarly privatized religious coping. Institutional measures of religion were found to impact individuals' religious coping styles. Implications are suggested for the scientific study of religion as well as for the applied efforts of clergy, pastoral counselors, and lay church members concerned with improving religious benefits.

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The present study identified factors involved with newly licensed registered nurses' perceptions of job difficulties, job demands and job control which will help managers redesign work settings to retain new nurses.

This research investigates the potential dimensionality of environmental worldviews using a scale derived from the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP). It delineates the substantive consequences of dimensionality for our understanding of environmental behavior and both demographic and religious correlates of environmentalism. We found that our NEP-based Scale of Worldview contained two distinct dimensions that were differentially predicted by demographic and religious variables. Of particular importance was the relationship of religious fundamentalism to the two subscales thereby highlighting the inherent religious implications of NEP item wording. In general, we found that Worldviews do not contribute substantially to the prediction of Environmental Behavior. Additionally, Worldviews do not allow us to account for demographic differences in the performance of Environmental Behavior. We concluded that environmental worldviews have limited policy implications given the lack of correspondence to behavior but that they remain an important prerequisite to such behavior which is deserving of careful study.