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A couple thoughts about the Gallup poll regarding reported mental and physical health among Americans from 2019 to 2020. 1) There will be people who point to “weekly attendance” of a religious service being the only group that had an increase https://twitter.com/howertonjosh/status/1336840410921099269
In self-reported mental well-being (“excellent” response) at +4 as evidence that more in-person worship with less restrictions will fix a mental health crisis caused by COVID-19. 2) Those people may be operating on confirmation bias. Here’s why:
1. The error margin for the reported scores are +/-4 points. That means that the +4 could be as high as +8 or as low as 0. Being a Democrat is associated with a change of -1 (so as low as -5 & high as +3) and wouldn’t be as dangerous as
Being in a room with a lot of other people for a long time. And you could change your party affiliation after COVID is “done” 
. Seriously though, a score that is only 5 points higher than another, and the difference being within the margin of error is NOT some great triumph.
. Seriously though, a score that is only 5 points higher than another, and the difference being within the margin of error is NOT some great triumph.
2. The poll doesn’t seem to specify (and I couldn’t find how “weekly attendance” was defined) if weekly attendance means in-person only. There may be two groups of people who are covered within the “weekly attendance” group. Maybe online attendance has the same supposed
Mental health benefits (you’ll see why I say supposed in a moment). We cannot say that in-person worship attendance is a solution to a mental health crisis when we don’t know if that’s even how attendance is defined.
3. In point 2 I put “associated”. Here’s why: in research of any kind there is an important phrase that goes like this: correlation is not causation. Humans like to find patterns; we’re good at finding them, even if they aren’t actually there. Just because two things
Appear to be related does not mean that one caused the other. To actually determine what causes something else you have to do a research study that isolates variables, and a poll doesn’t do that. There could be any number of reasons that people who attend weekly
Worship services would report higher (marginally higher, I might add) mental health that have little to nothing to do with their attending weekly. It could be that the kind of people who attend weekly religious services are more optimistic, or more resilient, or... anything.
I’d love to see a social science research project that looked at that question, but this poll is NOT evidence that attending weekly services causes improved mental health, as much as we would like that to be the answer.
4) This poll measured people’s mental health based on their self-report. Now, as a licensed professional counselor I utilize a lot of self-report scales to look at how a person’s mental health is doing. Each of them has gone through rigorous psychometric rigamarole
To make sure that it is accurately measuring what it says it is measuring in the kind of person it is measuring (like Beck’s Depression Inventory for... depression). You’ll be interested to know that there is no clinical self-report measure that measures “mental health”.
The concept is so nebulous that you couldn’t actually know what that means at a group level. Now, I’m not saying that the poll isn’t helpful in regards to this question. It is, if we want to know how people perceive their own mental well-being (with the reported +/- being change
In those reporting they have “excellent” mental health). However, as a counselor I know both from research and anecdotally that people have many different reasons to self-report if their mental health is “good” or “bad”, “awful” or “excellent”.
Sometimes the self-report is incredibly different than what shows up when we measure the common mental health difficulties (anxiety, depression, loss of functioning) using clinical measures.
This all boils down to a strong suggestion: if you are someone who loves people and wants the best for them, please don’t use this poll as evidence to confirm your strong, sincere desire to be back in physical community with all the people you love.
I say this as someone who has t gathered with his beloved church family in person since March. I desperately want my family to be back there, but this poll isn’t the evidence to do it because:
As a mental health professional I know that basing community mental health interventions on Gallup polls is not good practice. Especially when I see the heartache that is caused by people putting themselves and others at risk by gathering
In large groups for long periods of time. Pastors, maybe encourage your people to get some counseling through the many professional counselors who are offering their services online. We want to help, and the research suggests we DO help.
Please be wise in how you use polls. Don’t let your desires use this as an excuse to be unwise.
