The Influence of Early Trauma on the Quality of Life in Taiwan: The Moderating Impacts of Religiosity?

A growing body of life course research based on the Western societies has displayed the long-term negative effects of childhood and teenage trauma on life conditions in later life stages and has pointed out that religion plays an essential role in moderating or buffering the critical impact of early trauma. However, whether similar patterns appear in Asian societies remains largely unexamined. It is especially ambiguous whether the effectiveness of religion’s coping impacts applies to Asian societies where religious compositions are more diversified with non-Christian religions. As a result, this research regards Taiwan as an ideal setting to elaborate the associations among early trauma, religiosity and two indicators of adulthood life quality: happiness and self-reported health.

With the utilization of the data drawn from two nationwide representative samples: the 2009 Religion Module of the Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS) and the Survey of Religious Experience in Taiwan (REST), three sets of questions are investigated. The first sets of analyses enable this research to ascertain the impacts of diverse dimensions of early trauma on the life quality, including quantity views (as indicated by the number of early traumatic events), category views (as classified as parental-related, sibling-related, self-related, and economic early trauma), and juncture views (as sorted into childhood traumas and teenage traumas). Furthermore, this research discusses whether the Taiwanese with higher level of childhood and teenage traumas tend to display higher level of various types of religiosity during adulthood, including belonging aspect (as grouped into no-religion, diffused-religion, and institutional-religion), belief aspect (as measured by attitudes toward supreme god and spirituality), and behaviors aspect (as determined by public religious attendance, private observance, and religious techniques).  Last but not least, this research gauges whether the negative influence of early trauma on adulthood life quality is moderated and buffered by religiosity during adulthood.