Surveying religious belief needs social science not hard science

[cbayer]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/dec/05/nones-on-the-run-religion

People's responses to surveys about the emotive question of religion are notoriously difficult to pin down

Linda Woodhead
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 December 2012 05.09 EST


The Centre for Longitudinal Studies suggests that 'a quarter of responses to any question on religion are unreliable'. Photograph: Dean Murray/Rex Features

Surveyitis is a disease that afflicts people who stay indoors too long poring over data. It can be alleviated by fresh air and meeting people. Symptoms include credulity about the accuracy of survey responses and morbid attachment to outdated questions. It is particularly dangerous in relation to religion.

A recent upsurge in interest in "nones" suggests a new outbreak of surveyitis. Nones are those who declare on surveys that they have no religion or belief. The fact that their number has been rising is cited by humanists and other there-is-no-God-botherers as proof of the demise of religion. A new report from the thinktank Theos points out that the "nones" encompass "nevers" who don't participate, "atheists" who don't believe, and the "non-religious" who don't belong to a particular religion, and that a significant percentage retain some religious beliefs and practices. The report concludes that we are dealing with shades of grey rather than black or white religion or secularity. Fair enough. But only surveyitis could have led to the idea that a bald religion question could tell us anything useful in the first place.

When it comes to surveys, the simpler, more concrete and less emotionally freighted a question the better. "Did you eat an egg for breakfast?" is good and "What party did you just vote for?" is OK, so long as it's anonymous. The problem with religion is that there aren't many questions like this. "Did you go to church last Sunday?" might seem fairly straightforward, but when American researchers counted cars in church parking lots they found that conservative Christians massively exaggerated their actual attendance. That's because it mattered to them – and the more an issue means to people, the more difficult it is to get simple and reliable answers.

It's even worse when questions are also vague and contested. Anything with the word "religion" in it falls into this category. No one has ever been able to agree a definition of religion, nor will they. So it's amazing to expect that survey respondents will miraculously understand the word, and mean the same thing. Even the smallest of changes to the wording of a religion question can make a significant difference to the responses. The Office for National Statistics demonstrated this beautifully when it experimented with small changes to the question on religion in preparation for the 2011 census. A new report from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies suggests with some exasperation that "a quarter of responses to any question on religion are unreliable".

more at link

[mike_c]

1. are you suggesting that religious moralists cannot be relied upon...

...to answer simple questions truthfully?

Not that I disagree, mind you.

[cbayer]

4. What's a religious moralist?

[mike_c]

8. someone who accepts and spreads moral precepts founded upon religious dogma...

...i.e. "Thou shalt not lie." Even, or perhaps especially, about whether one attended church last week.

Moralist: One who follows a system of moral principles.

Religion adds an interesting dimension to moralism. On one hand, I think certain human mores are generally agreed upon despite cultural disparities-- most people instinctively don't want to be lied to, stolen from, unfairly attacked, and so on, so most people extend those same moral protections to others, at least emotionally and intellectually, if not always in reality. It's what we mean by "knowing right from wrong," regardless of our actual practice.

Religion adds another layer of complexity by both codifying moral precepts, making them explicit rather than implicit, and generally by adding additional consequences for failure to adhere to those basic moral ideals, e.g. god's displeasure. So it's especially ironic to read that surveys about religion are suspect mainly because religious people themselves can't be trusted to respond honestly to simple questions like "did you attend church last Sunday?"

[cbayer]

10. The point of the article, imo, is that answers from both religious and non-religious people

are unreliable because the questions are outdated and don't account for all the grey areas where many people find themselves. While she uses the church attendance question as an example, she also notes that the unreliability extends to those without religious beliefs.

[Goblinmonger]

2. Yes, the think tank Theos

is certainly who I would turn to for an unbiased assessment of what the rise in "nones" means. Yep. No bias there.

[trotsky]

12. Isn't it a great thing we have believers who are so willing (and able) to tell us what we,

as nonbelievers of some stripe, really believe?

[patrice]

3. I usually have trouble with the word "religion" and I don't find "spirituality" much better.

I don't like "religion", because it implies some kind of externally imposed form of authoritarian order/organization/institutionalization, which, while not necessarily intrinsically 100% in error in and of itself, cannot encompass all of the variations in relationships between individuals and their best/truest approximations of reality/truth (as in "I am the way, the truth and the life ...", which, if you look at the whole story of the life of Jesus, I regard as a call to BE the truth yourself, to live it all of the time). Religion, by its emphasis upon organization, discounts the relatively unique perspective encoded into each person, then, people come to habitually ignore it and, thus, make mistakes that add up to things like the Holocaust or inquisitions against various others, or un-necessary wars based on lies about entire nations of INNOCENT Muslims.

"Spirituality" on the other hand seems to imply absolutely anything you want, which I think is also a high-probability of error.

Maybe I just don't see the necessity of having a different sort of word for a basic instinct to relate to whatever is. Many people would refer to that as "knowing" and I'm pretty comfortable with that since I know there are different kinds of knowing. For example, I know that quantum physics is true, but I, currently, know that in a different kind of way from how I know that this cup of coffee is too cold.

[cbayer]

5. I think more and more people are feeling just as you do.

The "nones" are comprised of many people in this category.

There have been good arguments made for a new nomenclature. One that recognizes all the grey areas and doesn't so rigidly define people would be useful. Our current nomenclature doesn't really lend itself to good studies, it seems.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Would you support removing the religion clause from the US 1st amendment?

If the word is a problem, then "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" might be a bad thing to have in a constitution.

[patrice]

15. I don't expect perfection from anything & The Constitution is an excellent example of imperfection,

functional imperfection that, because it IS imperfection, drives various processes.

I generally don't think it worth the effort to try to force anyone to see things my way, though I really do enjoy it if it happens that they do. I enjoy a good debate too as much as the next person, but, most of the time, I don't particularly care if people disagree with me if I "lose" a debate. Just like I do, they have to think whatever they think in order to have any chance to recognize their own errors and adapt however they're going to adapt. No matter how right I might be, it does them little good to not have thoughts of their own.

My concerns about the establishment clause would be limited to how behaviors based upon it can affect my rights and, because I am talking about rights here, that must include how whatever affects my rights can and does also affect the rights of others, so if I'm concerned for my own rights I must be concerned for theirs too. That's all about the effects of behaviors and their consequences, not directly about what might or might not be whatever we could, validly or not, call a religion.

I guess I'm still mulling this over, because I have to admit that of all of the stuff, human endeavors and interests and values of various types, why is that particular one, religion, written into the 1st amendment? I can be dodgey and limit my concerns to the effects of religious behavior as much as I want, that doesn't deal with the root cause of at least some of those problem behaviors which has something to do with whatever it was that apparently specially selected religion for inclusion in The Constitution in the first place.

[DreamGypsy]

6. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyone who cares about poll results, and accepts them without investigating and understanding the methodology used, including the types of questions asked, is likely to be misinformed. Since we are bombarded with so many polls, surveys, and articles citing polls and surveys we should take all their findings or reportings with at least a tablespoon of salt.

The survey form shown in the article is a stock photo of a U.K. census form.

From Wikipedia:

The table below shows the most recent census data (2001) regarding religion:[33]

Religion Number %
Christian 42,079,000 71.6%
No religion 9,104,000 15.5%
Muslim 1,591,000 2.7%
Hindu 559,000 1.0%
Sikh 336,000 0.6%
Jewish 267,000 0.5%
Buddhist 152,000 0.3%
Other religion 179,000 0.3%
Not stated 4,289,000 7.3%
Total religious 45,163,000 76.8%

Rather than select one of the specified religions offered on the 2001 Census form, many people chose to write in their own religion. Some of these religions were reassigned to one of the main religions offered, predominantly within the Christian group.

In England and Wales, 151,000 people belonged to religious groups which did not fall into any of the main religions. The largest of these were Spiritualists (32,000) and Pagans (31,000), followed by Jain (15,000), Wicca (7,000), Rastafarian (5,000), Bahà'ì (5,000) and Zoroastrian (4,000).

Although the Census 2001 also recorded 390,000 Jedi Knights, making Jedi the fourth-largest "religion" in the UK, this does not confer them any official recognition. In fact, all returns with "Jedi Knight" were classified as "No religion", along with Atheist, Agnostic, Heathen and those who ticked "Other" but did not write in any religion.

An Office for National Statistics survey of 450,000 Britons in 2010 confirmed that 71% are Christian, 4% are Muslim and 21% lack a religious affiliation.[34] .

Signing out,

ONE JEDI KNIGHT

[cbayer]

7. Agree. The *reassignment* noted could be highly subjective.

I would like to see more breakdown of the "nones".

[patrice]

9. All knowledge is contextual, so knowing includes the precise traits of the relevant context, this is

what makes knowing useful; those contexts are selected facets of the physical world, part of what we call reality.

.............................


I'm not sure I understand what you are saying about religion. More people identifying as _________________ (whatever) means what? other than more people identifying as whatever . . . more people filled in a certain circle on somekind of instrument. What validity is there beyond that fact?

[trotsky]

11. Yes, the church attendance figures have long been known to have a "halo bias."

Please note, that bias is in FAVOR of pro-religious answers on surveys. While your agenda of seeking to discredit the rise of the "nones" through any means possible has been crystal clear for some time now, I don't think you'll find much in the way of support for that agenda here. If anything, the survey would have been more likely to sway people into the religious categories.

Keep trying, maybe you'll find that silver bullet to put atheists in their place once and for all.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. The British Humanist Association asked the census question, and others, in a poll

When asked the census question ‘What is your religion?’, 61% of people in England and Wales ticked a religious box (53.48% Christian and 7.22% other) while 39% ticked ‘No religion’.

But when asked ‘Are you religious?’ only 29% of the same people said ‘Yes’ while 65% said ‘No’, meaning over half of those whom the census would count as having a religion said they were not religious.

Even more revealingly, less than half (48%) of those who ticked ‘Christian’ said they believed that Jesus Christ was a real person who died and came back to life and was the son of God.

Asked when they had last attended a place of worship for religious reasons, most people in England and Wales (63%) had not attended in the past year, 43% of people last attended over a year ago and 20% of people had never attended. Only 9% of people had attended a place of worship within the last week

http://humanism.org.uk/2011/03/20/news-771/

The actual census results for 'what is your religion' are due out next week.