Pew Research Center used content analysis methods to measure global restrictions on religion in 2022. This is the 15th in a series of annual reports by the Center analyzing the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. The study rates 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. The study is based on the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.

•The Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices. The GRI comprises 20 measures of restrictions, including efforts by governments to ban particular faiths, prohibit conversion, limit preaching or give preferential treatment to one or more religious groups.

•The Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. This includes religion-related armed conflict or terrorism, mob or sectarian violence, harassment over attire for religious reasons, and other forms of religion-related intimidation or abuse. The SHI includes 13 measures of social hostilities. 

To track these indicators of government restrictions and social hostilities, researchers combed through more than a dozen publicly available, widely cited sources of information, including the U.S. Department of State’s annual Reports on International Religious Freedom and annual reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), as well as reports and databases from a variety of European and United Nations bodies and several independent, nongovernmental organizations.

This study is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.

As of December 2024, one report has been published that focuses on the findings from this data:
"Government Restrictions on Religion Stayed at Peak Levels Globally in 2022":
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/12/18/government-restrictions-on-religion-stayed-at-peak-levels-globally-in-2022/

The following files are contained in the Global Restrictions on Religion 2007-2022 Dataset.zip file:
•Stata dataset - contains all the publicly released variables from the Global Restrictions on Religion dataset in Stata format
•CSV dataset - contains all the publicly released variables (without labels) from the Global Restrictions on Religion dataset in an open-source format
•Codebook - the questionnaire used to answer questions for each country and territory in the dataset, along with a description of the methodology, any changes in sources and coding methods over the years, and the variables included in the dataset
•Dataset note - explains small discrepancies in calculated values in previous publications 

This is a cumulative dataset that forms the basis of previously published religious restrictions reports. 