Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Question 1: Measuring religious identity How does Pew Research Center measure the religious identity of survey respondents and the religious composition of the U.S.? Answer: Generally, we rely on respondents’ self-identification. A key question we ask in many surveys is: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such […]
Social scientists have proposed various explanations for age gaps in religious commitment around the world. One common explanation is that new generations become less religious in tandem with economic development – as collective worries about day-to-day survival become less pervasive and tragic events become less frequent. According to this line of thinking, each generation in […]
Research suggests that the social interaction inherent in a telephone or in-person interview may exert subtle pressures on respondents that affect how they answer questions. The ways respondents change in response to these pressures is the basis of “mode studies” in social science. For example, respondents may feel a need to present themselves in a […]
Muslim Americans constitute a population that is rare, dispersed and diverse. It includes many recent immigrants from multiple countries with different native languages who may have difficulty completing a public opinion survey in English. The intense attention paid to Muslims in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and abroad, as well as the […]
Telephone polls still provide accurate data on a wide range of social, demographic and political variables, but some weaknesses persist.
By Courtney Kennedy, Kyley McGeeney and Scott Keeter Now that over 90% of U.S. adults have cellphones,[1. Stephen J. Blumberg and Julian V. Luke. Wireless substitution: Early Release of Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, July–December 2015. National Center for Health Statistics. May 2016. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis.htm] survey researchers are considering whether it is necessary […]
To better understand the current landscape of commercially available online nonprobability samples, Pew Research Center conducted a study in which an identical questionnaire was administered to nine samples supplied by eight different vendors along with the Center’s probability-based online panel. A benchmarking analysis – in which a subset of each survey’s results was compared to […]
Online nonprobability surveys are fast, cheap, and increasingly popular. We compared nine samples and found that accuracy varied substantially.
This appendix aims to put the findings from the Religious Landscape Study into a broader context through a comparison of its results with long-term trends from the General Social Survey (GSS), Gallup Organization surveys and results from ongoing polls conducted monthly by Pew Research Center. Generally, these sources indicate that there is a fair amount […]