{"id":47016,"date":"2024-04-19T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47016"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:22:24","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T02:22:24","slug":"how-often-do-members-pray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/04\/how-often-do-members-pray\/","title":{"rendered":"How Often Do Members Pray?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-47025 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-800x800.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"398\" height=\"398\" srcset=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-800x800.png 800w, https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-360x359.png 360w, https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-260x260.png 260w, https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy-160x160.png 160w, https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy.png 1238w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 398px) 100vw, 398px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report <\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/bhroberts.org\/2023CFLDS_Methodology_.pdf\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">here<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How often do members pray? This is one of those standard questions that are in most religion surveys and many generalist surveys. Still, the problem with virtually all such surveys is that the Latter-day Saint sample is too small to derive reliable estimates from. However, the Cooperative Election Study is one of the few surveys that has both a prayer question, an affiliation question, and a large enough sample overall that even the Latter-day Saint subset is pretty big (relatively speaking, N=706). This sample was used in this <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.deseret.com\/faith\/2023\/12\/27\/23998312\/data-challenges-spiritual-but-not-religious-concept\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">piece for the Deseret News<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on how people who don\u2019t go to Church much also don\u2019t pray much.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By comparing our results with the CES\u2019 we can be even more sure of our estimates since it\u2019s essentially a \u201cin the mouths of two or three surveys\u201d situation. So what do the numbers say?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First, the questions are worded somewhat differently, and this can be important:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>CES:<\/b> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">People practice their religion in different ways. Outside of attending religious services, how often do you pray?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>2023CFLDS:<\/b> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">About how often do you pray alone?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also, as seen below, the response options are different, and some of the categories that sort of fit together are yielding different results. Still the overall picture is remarkably similar.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">About half of members indicate that they pray \u201cseveral times a day,\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">About 15% pray once a day.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Never-praying members are very small minorities in each case (single digits).<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overall, the typical member appears to have very vibrant prayer lives, at least as measured by prayer frequency.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-47026 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screen-800x415.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"705\" height=\"374\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-47027 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot2-800x478.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"586\" height=\"356\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here. How often do members pray? This is one of those standard questions that are in most religion surveys and many generalist surveys. Still, the problem with virtually all such surveys is that the Latter-day Saint sample is too small to derive reliable estimates from. However, the Cooperative Election Study is one of the few surveys that has both a prayer question, an affiliation question, and a large enough sample overall that even the Latter-day Saint subset is pretty big (relatively speaking, N=706). This sample was used in this piece for the Deseret News on how people who don\u2019t go to Church much also don\u2019t pray much.\u00a0 By comparing our results with the CES\u2019 we can be even more sure of our estimates since it\u2019s essentially a \u201cin the mouths of two or three surveys\u201d situation. So what do the numbers say?\u00a0 First, the questions are worded somewhat differently, and this can be important:\u00a0 CES: People practice their religion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Screenshot-copy.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47016"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50244,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47016\/revisions\/50244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}