Conducted a survey of 146 women (Mean age = 41.3. There were too few male respondants to permit statistical analysis) who had taken part in a newspaper questionairre survey on attachment and romantic relationships some four years earlier (Hazan & Shaver, 1987) about changes in their religious beliefs and behaviours. The objective was to determine how attachment style related to religious change over time and to resolve the apparent conflict between earlier results which appeared to alternatively support the compensation and the correspondance hypotheses.

Subjects were classified according to their earlier attachmnent style result. This early survey also questioned subjects on religious feelings and results were used as a control, to ensure that only changes over the four year period were analysed.
The questionairre asked seven questions about their religious experiences over the last 4 years. Results are presented below as percentage of attachment style that reported 1 or more instances of each event. Significant results (p < 0.05) are highlighted.
 

	Avoidant	Anxious	Secure
Changed churches	4.8	17.9	17.6
Changed denominations	4.3	7.1	8.1
Had religious experience or conversion	7.1	25.0	9.5
Born again	2.4	10.7	1.4
Spoken in tongues	0.0	7.1	2.7
Found new relationship with God	38.1	35.7	18.9
Lost faith in God	4.8	7.4	2.7
Attachment distribution (N=146)	30%	18%	52%

 
Significant results were that insecure (both anxious and avoidant) women were more likely to have found a new relationship with God. This was taken as supportive of God acting in a compensatory role over the intervening period. For anxious women, God would not be frightened away by their obsessive and demanding style of attaching and they would be free to experience a highly charged emotional relationship. This was consistent with the other significant result, that anxious women were more likely to have had a religious experience or to have converted over the intervening period.  Whilst not significant, anxious women were also found to have been most likely to have engaged in 'speaking in tongues'.

For avoidant women, this also provides support for the compensation model, but with them characteristically experiencing the relationship with God as less dramatic, thus they report a new relationship with God but fewer 'religious experiences' and dramatic conversions.

It was noted that there are gender differences in attachment and relationship experience, as well as established gender differences on religion variables, which preclude any generalization of the above results to males.