The Impact of Religious Salience Moderated by Resilience and Psychological Well-being in the context of a Mentally Healthy School: Senior High School in Jabodetabek Case Study

Abstract

Mental health problems at school become our concern, that includes psychological distress or improve the psychological well-being. We measure relationship between mental health, resiliency, and religiosity during our Mentally Healthy School study. One of the study conducted in a public high school in Jabodetabek area, Indonesia to 115 students. There are five dimensions of religiosity that important to the live of adolescents which are religious beliefs, religious exclusivity, external practice, personal practice, and religious salience. Mental Health that include Psychological Well Being and Psychological Distress was measured using MHI-38 that resulted in Global Mental Health Scale, resiliency was measured using PsyCap Questionnaire, and we developed a General Religiosity Scale (GRS) to measure the five dimension of religiosity. During our research, we found that religious salience is significantly correlated with resilience and mental health (p<0.01). This study provides further discussion on the religious salience and how to improve it. The result on our study is in line with previous research on religious salience, resiliency, and mental health.  It also in line with Islamic teaching. Islamic teaching views spiritual and religious aspects as things that cannot be separated from daily life. Referring to the Qur'an, the Muslim Community believes that the purpose of man’s creation is to worship the Allah Ta’ala. Al-Ghazali understands this verse as the empowerment of the self in worshiping and focusing on the purpose of worship. We suggest improving religious salience on adolescent to promote mental health. We also suggest that the research conducted in Boarding Schools, Pesantren or madrasah to get more representative results on the Mentally Healthy School study.