16 comments for “Pew Facts

  1. Cool stats. Very enlightening, and interesting from a national view, but with only 577 respondents, I’m not sure i’d consider it a true representational sample of the religions.

    Yes, with 577 respondents it is statistically significant, but I have a hard time thinking that 51 percent of Mormon adults, more than half of whom are married don’t have any children. I have a hard time believing the educational sample (especially after the last LDS survey I took), and other demographics listed. My guess is that they had an equal number of respondents in each state (100 or so for each state), and they only got 577 mormons across the nation. And due to that methodology, the results would be skewed, and not representative of the religiousity and true demographics of each religious group.

    But hey, I only design a 4-5 surveys a year…

    And this is still pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing Frank.

  2. “I have a hard time thinking that 51 percent of Mormon adults, more than half of whom are married don’t have any children”

    I parsed it as “children in the home,” meaning that that 51% would include empty-nesters. Not sure which is correct.

  3. Visor,

    Sample size is about 35,000. If you think they sampled equally by state that would be 700 per state, not 100.

    But they clearly did not do that. You can go to the maps and see breakdowns (and sample sizes) by state. About 3500 (10%) of the sample was from CA, and they sampled 323 (1%) Utahns. Those numbers seem roughly in line with national representativeness.

  4. Julie is right, the reported number is “children at home”. You can see in the chart that we have far more kids than most, jibing with one’s expectation.

  5. I wonder if Pew would be interested in some tools that would make it much easier for them to find and survey large numbers of Mormons across the country. I am working on some ideas that don’t involve membership lists.

  6. Was it a phone survey? I can easily believe that men are more likely than women to hang up on a phone survey.

  7. Vader,

    Good question, but that is something most surveys are designed to deal with. You can see from the survey that 52% of respondents are female. In the 2000 Census, 51% of the population was female, and I would guess that since this survey is only for those 18 and older, 52% might be about right.

  8. Am I reading it right–that “Mormons” are comprised of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as Community of Christ? That might tilt the data a bit.

  9. It is a very interesting survey, and suggests that on most cultural, social and political issues, LDS are to the right of evangelicals and to the left of Jehovah Witnesses. Seriously. Look at attitudes on evolution, homosexuality, partisan identification etc….

  10. DavidH, yeah, we’re getting way too liberal. But seriously, I didn’t see any result that seems way out of line. Pew seems to have done a pretty good job getting a realistic sample.

    One result that surprised me: members of historically black churches are more likely to be suspicious of environmentalism (38 percent) than Mormons (36 percent). Al Gore, call your office!

  11. This Pew Survey is one of the largest-sample, broadest surveys of religion in America that I know of. It’s a great achievement in social scientific research on religion.

    The most striking numbers to me are the ones that have to do with private devotion and belief. Mormons report very high levels of personal prayer, church attendance and scripture study, and belief in God, heaven and miracles. There are also some hard data to refute the idea that actual Mormon activity rates in the U.S. are far lower than the church’s reported membership numbers. According to the survey about 3.2 million American adults call themselves Mormon in the LDS tradition, and the vast majority of them say they practice in some way.

  12. This poll really bothered by Baptist friend. Seems Mormons are more likely to have read the Bible, prayed, etc. than most other religions.

  13. It saying Mormons are more likely to have read the Bible shocks me. Read some sort of scripture maybe, but most people I know have never read the Bible other than turning to specific versus as a teacher reads.

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