![]() So let’s simplify things. We’ll collapse Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox-Christian, and Christian into a new variable called Christian-Combined, we’ll keep None as it is, and we’ll collapse everything else into a new variable called Other-Combined.īack at the Analysis page, change Row to this: Unfortunately, the default visualization, a stacked bar chart, is hard to read with so many variables: None has increased more or less continuously during this period, rising from 5.1% in 1972 to 20.7% in 2014.Catholic held steady around 25% throughout 1972–2014.Protestant held steady around 63% from 1972–1993, and since then has dropped steadily, ending at 43.2% in 2014. ![]() These three answers represented 95% of all answers in 1972, 95.1% of responses in 1993, and 89.3% of responses in 2014. The vast majority of Rs (respondents) are Protestant, Catholic, or None.Glancing over the table quickly, we can see that: Since our Column variable is YEAR and our Row variable is RELIG, the percentage in each cell represents the percentage of respondents for that year which gave that row’s response to the query about their religious preference. The bold number in each cell is the Column percent. Respondents were asked a follow-up question if they responded with Protestant or Other, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with such details.Ĭlick Analysis on the Berkeley SDA site and set Row to RELIG and Column to YEAR:Ĭlick Run the Table and you’ll get a page with, among others things, a huge table: Okay, good: there’s nothing weird to watch out for here. Search the Codebook PDF for VAR: RELIG and you’ll see: But first, let’s make sure we understand our variable. We’ll do the analysis of RELIG at the Berkeley SDA site because it’s quicker. RELIG: What is R’s religious preference?.Luckily, two highly relevant variables stand out as being available for all years: If we scroll through the results, we see that GOD was first collected in 1988, RELSPRT doesn’t even appear (the Berkeley SDA variable search is more thorough), THEISM was first collected in 1991, and IMPCHURH was only collected once. It shows you right away the available years of data for each variable! It’s a slower site in my experience, and it shows less information on each variable than the Berkeley SDA site does, but search for God | religion | religiosity | "religious attendance" (the | is used for OR on this site) and you’ll notice a handy feature: This is one place where the GSS Data Explorer comes in handy. We can also see that, unfortunately, RELSPRT was only collected during 2008. Now we can see the non-truncated allowed answers. Search it for VAR: RELSPRT and you’ll find the variable details: For that you’ll want to download the latest GSS Codebook (47mb PDF). For example some of the allowed answers are truncated, and there’s no information on which years this question was asked. You’ll notice that some of the details here are missing. Click VIEW next to a variable name to see the variable’s actual details: These are my own short paraphrases of the questions asked of each R. IMPCHURH: How important are religion and church to R?.THEISM: How concerned with human affairs does R think God is?.GOD: How confident is R (the respondent) that God exists?.Let’s search for God OR religion OR religiosity OR "religious attendance":Īfter scrolling through several pages of results, some of the most promising variables for this purpose appear to be: The search field works basically like you’d expect, but click Search Techniques Help if you want to check the allowed operators and syntax. Click the Search button near the top, and we see this: Suppose you come across the claim that Americans have become less religious over time. Is that true? 3 This is precisely the kind of thing the GSS surveys people about, so let’s look up the data on the Berkeley SDA site:įirst, we want to find a variable that captures religiosity, or religious attendance, or belief in God, or something like that. You can download the data and analyze it in R or SPSS or whatever, but the data can also be analyzed very easily via two easy-to-use web interfaces: the UC Berkeley SDA site and the GSS Data Explorer. 1 The data were collected by NORC via face-to-face, 90-minute interviews in randomly selected households, every year (almost) from 1972–1994, and every other year since then. The GSS is a huge collection of data on the demographics and attitudes of non-institutional adults (18+) living in the US. Today I join Razib Khan’s quest to get bloggers to use the General Social Survey (GSS) more often. Part of the series: How to research stuff.
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