Measuring Religious Identities in Surveys (original) (raw)
Related papers
Recovering the Lost: Remeasuring U.S. Religious Affiliation
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2007
Over the past several decades, survey research has found a growing percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation. In this article, we introduce a modified religious traditions (RELTRAD) typology to measure religious affiliation. The approach benefits from a more detailed data collection and coding scheme of religious tradition based upon religious family, denomination, and congregation. Using new national survey data from the Baylor Religion Survey, we find: (1) improvement to survey design and measurement makes it possible to accurately locate more Americans within established religious traditions; (2) Americans remain connected to congregations, but less so to denominations or more generic religious identity labels; and (3) religious adherents are considerably more evangelical than prior studies have found. Finally, we consider how affiliation as a form of religious belonging relates to religious beliefs and behaviors.
The measure of American religion: Toward improving the state of the art
Social …, 2000
Recently, scholars have devoted renewed attention to the role of religion in American life. Thus, it is important that they use the most effective means available to categorize and study religious groups. However, the most widely used classification scheme in survey research (T.W. Smith 1990) does not capture essential differences between American religious traditions and overlooks significant new trends in religious affiliation. We critique this scheme based on its historical, terminological, and taxonomical inaccuracy and offer a new approach that addresses its shortcomings by using denominational affiliation to place respondents into seven categories grounded in the historical development of American religious traditions. Most important, this new scheme yields more meaningful interpretations because the categories refer to concrete religious traditions. Because of increased accuracy in classification, it also improves model fit and reduces measurement error.
The measure of American religion: Toward improving the state-of-the-art. Social Forces 79(1):291–318
2000
Recently, scholars have devoted renewed attention to the role of religion in American life. Thus, it is important that they use the most effective means available to categorize and study religious groups. However, the most widely used classification scheme in survey research (T.W. Smith 1990) does not capture essential differences between American religious traditions and overlooks significant new trends in religious affiliation. We critique this scheme based on its historical, terminological, and taxonomical inaccuracy and offer a new approach that addresses its shortcomings by using denominational affiliation to place respondents into seven categories grounded in the historical development of American religious traditions. Most important, this new scheme yields more meaningful interpretations because the categories refer to concrete religious traditions. Because of increased accuracy in classification, it also improves model fit and reduces measurement error. Since the rise of the...
2021
Religiosity in the United States remains a strong social force. The United States persistently demonstrates higher religious participation than Europe. Some recent trends documented by the Pew Research Center in its 2008 and 2015 publications on the U.S. religious landscape, however, cite evidence that different religious groups are experiencing very different trends in participation. These trends show a recent and significant decline among many moderate Protestant denominations but a modest increase in participation at fundamentalist churches. The Pew Research Center similarly documents significant inconsistencies between what a religious hierarchy teaches versus what individuals personally choose to believe. For example, and perhaps most strikingly, one-half of Christians believe that non-Christian religions can lead to salvation. This finding presents a significant challenge to a religious hierarchy: will members of the church actually embrace and live what the church teaches? An...
Making sense of surveys and censuses: Issues in religious self-identification
Religion, 2014
Censuses and surveys shape decisions, discourse and debates about people and their lived environments. The outcomes, in the case of a census, inform governments about resource distribution but also shape people's selfunderstanding about who they are and where they may be going. How people self-identify on censuses and surveys produces certain types of knowledge. This introduction emphasises the impact of those instruments on knowledge production and how numbers can be employed, often anecdotally, to further interests and claims. The way academics use and interpret such instruments has ethical and normative dimensions: numbers are not neutral but shape and are shaped by perceptions and identities. This introduction to a thematic issue of Religion introduces the contributing authors' diversehistorical, qualitative and quantitativeapproaches that work together to produce their own kind of multidisciplinary , academically located knowledge.
(178 words) From the earliest periods in the nation's history, some Americans have argued the United States of America is a uniquely religious nation. Arguments that American national identity has historically and culturally been reliant on religious foundations ignore alternative symbolic constructions of the bases for legitimate identity. The present study uses a nationally representative sample of the United States from the 1996 and 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) to test how people of different religious affiliations 1) identify with the nation, and 2) construct symbolic bases for national identity. My analysis shows that rates of identification with the nation are similar across all religious affiliations, including the non-religious, and therefore religion is not a requirement for individuals to self-identify as legitimate Americans. Individuals construct national identity in religious terms more frequently when such an interpretation reflects positively on them. This paper argues that religion should not be conceptualized as promoting a singular and necessary foundation for collective identity but that individuals construct differing subjective foundations for national identity based on the intersection of numerous social axes: religion, race, gender.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
The question of how Protestantism (including evangelicalism) is measured in social science research is of keen importance to those seeking to understand religion in American life. In this article, we compare and contrast two of the leading techniques for classifying Protestants. One of these approaches (the RELTRAD approach) categorizes respondents as evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or black Protestants mainly on the basis of their denominational affiliation. By contrast, the self-identification method utilizes information about a respondent's race and a yes/no question that asks respondents directly whether they consider themselves bornagain or evangelical Christians to create similar categories. We show that there is considerable overlap, though not perfect correlation, between the two approaches. Both methods produce similar estimates of the size of Protestant subgroups, and they paint similar religious and demographic portraits of the evangelical, mainline, and black Protestant communities. As a result, we argue that the self-identification method can be an effective proxy for RELTRAD when RELTRAD is unavailable as a measurement option.