A Systematic Review of 40 Years of Literature on Religiosity and Substance Abuse Among African Americans

The main purpose of this study is to systematically examine research conducted over the past 40 years regarding the effects of religiosity on substance abuse among African American. Studies used in this systematic review were gathered from peer-reviewed journals dating from 1977 to 2016. Over 223 studies were found from the electronic databases -Academic Search Premier, Eric, Psychology and Behavior Science Collections, Sociological collections, SociIndex using the key terms religion, religiosity, drug abuse, substance abuse, African American, and Black. In order to be included, studies were required to meet the following criteria: (1) the main focus of the study was on African American; (2) the study analyzed the relationship between religion and substance abuse; (3) the measure of religion was specified; and (4) the study used a quantitative design. 

Of those 223, only 17 mainly focused on religion and African American and therefore were included in this analysis. The soundness of the empirical evidence was assessed according to the sampling strategy, measurement of religiosity, and the quality of research methodology. The intra-rater reliability was .94 for all measures examined. The present study has used the same methodology as that used by Johnson et al. (2000). Regarding sampling strategy, five studies used random sampling. As for religious measurement, many studies did not cover the multiple dimensions of religious belief. Three studies used longitudinal data which greatly reduces the threat of spuriousness.  Many articles were not able to deal with sufficiently with measurement errors.

The quality of the studies was assessed using criteria developed by Cook and Campbell (1979). Eleven criteria are utilized to assess the quality of research. Each of these eleven criteria was coded as dichotomized outcome. Presence of these criteria was coded 1 and the absence as 0. The 17 articles used in the present study had an average score of .53 on the quality index, which has a score range of 0 to1. It was lower compared to previous systematic reviews (.59) by Johnson and his colleague (2000) on deviance.

Consistent with previous literatures that support an inverse relationship between religion and substance abuse, no study in this review suggests a positive relationship between religiosity and substance abuse among African American. However, four studies showed mixed effect that some dimension of religion had no effect on substance abuse. These four studies were ranked a little lower in terms of quality index (.52) than the rest of the studies that concluded that religion had a negative effect on substance abuse (.53).

Overall, the present study supports the previous findings that religion may play an important role in deciding whether or not to engage in substance abuse. However, in a given small number of research in the present review, the results should be interpreted with caution. The results of the present study indicate that a fuller understanding of the religious factors may be necessary to addressing the issue of substance abuse for African American. Rigorous race-specific research is needed in order to verify the findings of the present study.