Bayesian analysis of the association between religiosity and happiness in an Islamic context: evidence from Indonesian national survey data

Several systematic literature reviews on religiosity and happiness have confirmed a significant positive association between the two. However, they also highlighted several methodological limitations, including the use of non-probability sampling, small sample size, self-administered measurement, oversampled undergraduate students, lack of variety between cultures, and the restricted age range of the participants. Aspiring to overcome several of these methodological limitations, we have used national representative data to examine the relationship between religiosity and happiness in this study. The data consisted of participants’ responses during face-to-face interviews with 28,402 probability samples of Indonesian Muslims. The results of Bayesian regression analysis revealed that including religiosity as a predictor for happiness gives BF10 = 7.336 × 10+37, which showed that there was extreme evidence to support a model of happiness that includes religiosity as a predictor. This finding is noteworthy because we have overcome several of the methodological limitations of previous studies.