Making sense of surveys and censuses: Issues in religious self-identification

Abstract

Censuses and surveys shape decisions, discourse and debates about people and their lived environments. The outcomes, in the case of a census, inform governments about resource distribution but also shape people's selfunderstanding about who they are and where they may be going. How people self-identify on censuses and surveys produces certain types of knowledge. This introduction emphasises the impact of those instruments on knowledge production and how numbers can be employed, often anecdotally, to further interests and claims. The way academics use and interpret such instruments has ethical and normative dimensions: numbers are not neutral but shape and are shaped by perceptions and identities. This introduction to a thematic issue of Religion introduces the contributing authors' diverse -historical, qualitative and quantitative -approaches that work together to produce their own kind of multi-disciplinary, academically located knowledge.

Questions You Should Never Ask an Atheist: Towards Better Measures of Nonreligion and Secularity

“…However, even if the biases are unintentional, it is important for scholars studying the nonreligious or scholars studying religion who want to accurately portray the nonreligious to recognize that these questions are problematic at best and biased at worse. Question wording matters, as survey design experts have long known (Converse, 1986) and as others have shown with regard to nonreligion, specifically (Voas and Day, 2007;Day, 2011;Day and Lee, 2014). In the section that follows, I detail how even slight differences in question wording can result in very different estimates of the nonreligious population in a country.…”

Identification with Religion: Cross‐National Evidence from a Social Psychological Perspective

“…Given the profound social and cultural significance of religion and the emergence of secularism as a source of competition with religion in recent times, it is surprising that scholars have not gone further in conceptualizing and analyzing the factors that lead some individuals to prioritize their religious identity highly—despite calls to work toward a better theoretical understanding of the believing, behaving, bonding, and belonging dimensions of religion (Saroglou ; see also Day , ; Day and Lee ). The dominant approach (particularly among sociologists and political scientists) is to conceive of “identification” as affiliation (e.g., Djupe, Neiheisel, and Conger ; Hackett et al.…”

“…From an empirical standpoint, social scientists know a great deal about the factors that explain individual differences in religious affiliation (nominal membership in a specific religious tradition), nature and frequency of religious participation , content and devoutness of religious belief , and the extent to which religious life induces bonding with other people (Alwin et al. ; Davie ; Day and Lee ; Hackett ; Hogg, Adelman, and Blagg ; Leege and Kellstedt ; McGuire ; Saroglou ; Smidt, Kellstedt, and Guth ; Steensland et al. ; Woodberry et al.…”

Books Received

“…Apart from religious belonging, belief and practice, survey questions on self-identification have also been used as indicators of personal religiosity, albeit not without criticism. Many scholars have argued for the situational and context-dependent nature of such indicators and problematized their validity (Sjöborg 2013b;Day and Lee 2014). In the Swedish context, Swedish historian of religion David Thurfjell (2015) has suggested that self-identification as "non-religious" reflects distance from the category of self-identified "religious" rather than non-belief or lack of interest in existential matters.…”