When Piety Becomes Painful: Gender Moderation in the Relationship between Religious Scrupulosity and Loneliness among Emerging Adults

Abstract

The present study was designed to explore the link between religious scrupulosity and loneliness in Pakistani university students, while specifically examining whether gender plays a moderating role in this relationship. A total of 400 university students (177 male, 233 female), ranging in age from 19 to 25 years (M = 21.4, SD = 1.8), took part in the study. Participants completed the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity-Revised (PIOS-R) and the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale. There was a hierarchical regression analysis with the use of PROCESS Macro (Model 1) to determine whether gender moderated the relationship between scrupulosity and loneliness. The result indicated that there was an important positive correlation between religious scrupulosity and loneliness in the whole sample (r =.47, p <.001). More importantly, gender emerged as a significant moderator of this relationship (B = 0.15, SE = 0.05, t = 3.14, p = .002, 95% CI [0.06, 0.24]). Female participants exhibited a much greater level of association (B = 0.36) as compared to their male counterparts (B = 0.21). Further breakdown indicated that females had much more loneliness at higher scrupulosity levels compared to males, but that the gender difference had little at less scrupulosity levels. Such results indicate that young women having religious obsessions can be particularly susceptible to social loneliness. This weakness can be related to the gendered religious expectations, social inspection, and pressure on culture, which collectivistic societies accentuate especially. The paper highlights the necessity to design gender-sensitive mental health support services within universities and create awareness about the religious scrupulosity as a possible predisposing factor of loneliness in the young adulthood.