Religiosity and spirituality are frequently treated as interchangeable exposures in youth mental-health research, although their constituent dimensions may differ in direction, magnitude, stability, and suitability for intervention. This study asks which construct offers the strongest translation signal for depressive symptoms among people aged 10–24 years when statistical uncertainty, between-study inconsistency, intervention quality, and geographic concentration are considered together, and whether intervention evidence permits cautious extension to anxiety. A construct-level analytic dataset was assembled from published aggregate evidence covering 74 studies: 45 longitudinal investigations and 29 intervention studies. Four pooled longitudinal estimates for depressive symptoms were examined: religious salience, negative religious coping, positive religious coping, and spiritual wellbeing. We introduce robustness-calibrated construct triage, a probability-based procedure that reconstructs uncertainty on the Fisher-transformed correlation scale, generates 500,000 Monte Carlo draws per construct and stress condition, tests a smallest worthwhile absolute correlation of 0.05, and inflates standard errors by factors of 1.25, 1.50, and 2.00. Translation eligibility required a probability above 0.95 for the expected direction, a probability above 0.80 of exceeding the worthwhile-correlation threshold under 1.50-fold uncertainty, and at least one high-quality intervention study aligned with the construct. Spiritual wellbeing was the sole eligible construct. Its pooled correlation with depressive symptoms was \(r=-0.153\) (95% CI \(-0.187\) to \(-0.118\)); under 1.50-fold uncertainty, the probability of a protective direction was 1.000 and the probability of exceeding \(|r|=0.05\) was 0.99994. Negative religious coping showed a possible adverse association (\(r=0.090\)), but its corresponding stressed probabilities were 0.881 and 0.700. Religious salience was probably protective in direction yet very unlikely to reach the worthwhile magnitude, whereas positive religious coping remained statistically indeterminate. Intervention evidence reinforced the distinction: six of ten spiritual-wellbeing intervention studies were high quality, compared with two of twelve practice-oriented studies and none of seven salience-oriented studies. The answer to the research question is therefore construct-specific: depression-focused intervention development should prioritize spiritually inclusive meaning, acceptance, compassion, and connectedness rather than religious importance alone, while negative religious coping should be assessed as a possible vulnerability signal. Anxiety-related use remains provisional because anxiety-specific longitudinal estimates are sparse.
Religiosity and spirituality are frequently treated as interchangeable exposures in youth mental-health research, although their constituent dimensions may differ in direction, magnitude, stability, and suitability for intervention. This study asks which construct offers the strongest translation signal for depressive symptoms among people aged 10–24 years when statistical uncertainty, between-study inconsistency, intervention quality, and geographic concentration are considered together, and whether intervention evidence permits cautious extension to anxiety. A construct-level analytic dataset was assembled from published aggregate evidence covering 74 studies: 45 longitudinal investigations and 29 intervention studies. Four pooled longitudinal estimates for depressive symptoms were examined: religious salience, negative religious coping, positive religious coping, and spiritual wellbeing. We introduce robustness-calibrated construct triage, a probability-based procedure that reconstructs uncertainty on the Fisher-transformed correlation scale, generates 500,000 Monte Carlo draws per construct and stress condition, tests a smallest worthwhile absolute correlation of 0.05, and inflates standard errors by factors of 1.25, 1.50, and 2.00. Translation eligibility required a probability above 0.95 for the expected direction, a probability above 0.80 of exceeding the worthwhile-correlation threshold under 1.50-fold uncertainty, and at least one high-quality intervention study aligned with the construct. Spiritual wellbeing was the sole eligible construct. Its pooled correlation with depressive symptoms was \(r=-0.153\) (95% CI \(-0.187\) to \(-0.118\)); under 1.50-fold uncertainty, the probability of a protective direction was 1.000 and the probability of exceeding \(|r|=0.05\) was 0.99994. Negative religious coping showed a possible adverse association (\(r=0.090\)), but its corresponding stressed probabilities were 0.881 and 0.700. Religious salience was probably protective in direction yet very unlikely to reach the worthwhile magnitude, whereas positive religious coping remained statistically indeterminate. Intervention evidence reinforced the distinction: six of ten spiritual-wellbeing intervention studies were high quality, compared with two of twelve practice-oriented studies and none of seven salience-oriented studies. The answer to the research question is therefore construct-specific: depression-focused intervention development should prioritize spiritually inclusive meaning, acceptance, compassion, and connectedness rather than religious importance alone, while negative religious coping should be assessed as a possible vulnerability signal. Anxiety-related use remains provisional because anxiety-specific longitudinal estimates are sparse.
