U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and faith leaders pray at a 2017 proclamation signing in the Oval Office. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Indeed, half of U.S. adults either say they’re not sure what Trump’s religion is (34%) or that he has no religion (16%), while just 33% say he’s Protestant.
And Americans overall don’t think Trump is particularly religious: A majority say Trump is “not too” (23%) or “not at all” (40%) religious, while 28% say he’s “somewhat” religious and only 7% say he’s “very religious,” according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The statue “Fearless Girl,” across from the New York Stock Exchange, wearing a mask on March 22. (Luiz Roberto Lima-ANB/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Uncertainty driven by the current coronavirus outbreak has caused the U.S. stock market to wipe away three years of gains in a matter of weeks. The S&P 500 index fell from 3,386 on Feb. 19 this year to 2,305 on March 20, a loss of 32%. This rate of descent is much sharper than during the initial stages of the Great Recession, when it took from October 2007 to October 2008 to see a similar decrease in the index.
The economic stimulus package agreed to by Senate leaders and the White House appears to have restored some optimism in the market, at least for now. Even so, the losses will impact a wide swath of American families.
The steep fall in stock prices comes at a time when roughly four-in-ten U.S. workers (41%) have access to employer- or union-sponsored retirement plans, with the values of many of these plans linked to the stock market.
Data from 2016, the latest available, provides key insights into the broad reach of stock market investment in the United States. While a relatively small share of American families (14%) are directly invested in individual stocks, a majority (52%) have some level of investment in the market. Most of this comes in the form of retirement accounts such as 401(k)s. Read More →
Senior citizens shop at Northgate Gonzalez Market, a Hispanic specialty supermarket in Los Angeles, on March 19. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Hispanics are more concerned than Americans overall about the threat the COVID-19 outbreak poses to the health of the U.S. population, their own financial situation and the day-to-day life of their local community, according to a new survey fielded as part of Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways project.
The spread of the coronavirus has the potential to hit many of the nation’s nearly 60 million Latinos particularly hard. Although the Latino unemployment rate dipped at the end of 2019 to a near record low, many Latinos work in the leisure, hospitality and other service industries – and they are less likely to have health insurance. Latinos were hit especially hard by the Great Recession more than a decade ago, and some workers have only recently seen their median personal incomes bounce back and exceed pre-recession levels. Read More →
Three-in-ten U.S. adults say they have ever used a dating app or site, but the share of Americans who have done so differs sharply by marital status.
Adults who have never been married or who are currently living with a partner are the most likely to say they have ever used an online dating service: 52% and 46%, respectively, say this. By comparison, 35% of Americans who are divorced, separated or widowed say they have ever used a dating site or app, while 16% of married adults say the same, according to a new analysis of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2019. Read More →
Since 2002, Pew Research Center has conducted nearly 600,000 interviews with people in 64 countries to learn about their attitudes on important global issues of the day, as well as life in their own nation. Our newly updated Global Indicators Database serves as an interactive repository for many of these findings.
For students, researchers and anyone else interested in global public opinion, here’s a quick introduction to the types of analyses you can do with the database. Read More →
Workers install solar panels on a rooftop in Boulder, Colorado. (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
In a changing U.S. labor market, new and emerging occupations – including those that are linked to a green economy or the adoption of newer technologies – are raising the importance of analytical skills, such as science, mathematics and programming, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of federal government job-skills data.
New and emerging occupations either represent new lines of work or are newly deserving of their own classification due to rising employment and other factors. Examples of novel jobs include database architects and informatics nurse specialists. Among newly classified occupations are biostatisticians and intelligence analysts.
But the green economy is also raising the demand for some mechanical skills, such as equipment maintenance and repairing, which have diminished in importance in recent decades as the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs declines. With its emphasis on the environment and the sustainable use of resources, the green economy has stimulated employment in existing engineering and production jobs, ranging from industrial engineers to electricians, which often call for mechanical proficiency. Read More →
One of the key public health responses to the global coronavirus pandemic has been social distancing – avoiding large groups of people in close quarters in order to inhibit the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Along with shutting down sports leagues, closing churches and stores and limiting restaurants to take-out service only, a major tactic for social distancing has been encouraging – or requiring – people to work from home.
In that respect, COVID-19 may yet do what years of advocacy have failed to: Make telework a benefit available to more than a relative handful of U.S. workers. Only 7% of civilian workers in the United States, or roughly 9.8 million of the nation’s approximately 140 million civilian workers, have access to a “flexible workplace” benefit, or telework, according to the 2019 National Compensation Survey (NCS) from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And those workers who have access to it are largely managers, other white-collar professionals and the highly paid. (“Civilian workers” refers to private industry workers and state and local government workers combined.) Read More →
The COVID-19 outbreak has already led to large-scale closures of schools, workplaces and public gathering places across the United States, and “social distancing” measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are likely to lead to further disruptions.
Yet the thousands of cases of the new coronavirus are not evenly dispersed across the country. And the people most likely to say the disease threatens “day-to-day life” in their communities are those living in urban areas in states that have seen relatively high numbers of cases.
Overall, 36% of Americans say the coronavirus outbreak is a major threat to day-to-day life in their community, according to a new surveyconducted as part of Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways project.
How we did this
Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans in different parts of the country are responding to the new coronavirus outbreak. For this analysis, we surveyed 8,914 U.S. adults in March 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
In addition to using survey data from the ATP, this analysis uses data from the COVID Tracking Project (a collaboration between journalists at several organizations to track the spread of the disease in real time).
President Donald Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Vice President Mike Pence speak at a White House press briefing about U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump has received high marks from white evangelical Protestants on a range of issues throughout his time in office. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has proved no different – at least in the initial phase of the crisis, according to a new Pew Research Center survey gathered as part of the Election News Pathways project.
Around three-quarters of white evangelicals (77%) say they are at least somewhat confident that Trump is doing a good job responding to the outbreak, including roughly half who say they are very confident. Majorities of white evangelicals say Trump has assessed the risks of the situation correctly (64%) and that the crisis has been blown out of proportion by the media (76%), while just a quarter (24%) say Trump hasn’t taken risks tied to the coronavirus seriously enough. By comparison, about half of Americans overall (52%) say Trump has underplayed the risks, including majorities who say this among the religiously unaffiliated (64%), black Protestants (67%) and Jews (73%).
An elementary school cafeteria manager hands a woman free breakfast and lunch meals for her grandchildren on March 17 in Boston. Schools there are closed amid the COVID-19 outbreak. (Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)
Americans say there has been a decline in public trust in the federal government and in each other, and they believe this erosion of confidence makes it harder to solve some of the nation’s pressing problems, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in late 2018.
But one finding from the study may offer some hope as the country confronts the new coronavirus: Three-quarters of Americans said people would cooperate with each other in a crisis, even if they didn’t trust each other. Around a quarter (24%) said people wouldn’t cooperate in a crisis if they didn’t trust each other.
Cooperating in a time of a crisis has taken on new urgency as federal, state and local government leaders urge Americans to stay at home, practice “social distancing” and take other steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (It’s important to note that respondents to the 2018 survey may have been focusing more on how Americans might actively assist those in need during a crisis, rather than steering clear of others to avoid spreading a virus.) Read More →
Yet the thousands of cases of the new coronavirus are not evenly dispersed across the country. And the people most likely to say the disease threatens “day-to-day life” in their communities are those living in urban areas in states that have seen relatively high numbers of cases.
