How should Mass attendance be measured? An Italian case study

Narratives of Response Error From Cognitive Interviews of Survey Questions About Normative Behavior

“…Presser and Stinson (1998) further developed this research program, comparing conventional survey estimates to those from time diary data in the mid-1990s in the United States, discovering large gaps between the two, although somewhat smaller than those demonstrated by Hadaway et al (1993Hadaway et al ( , 1998. Brenner then expanded the analysis of Presser and Stinson to cover four decades and 14 countries across North America and the Europe (2011a), finding large and consistent gaps between diary and conventional survey data in the United States (2011b) and Canada (2012), and, to a lesser extent, Italy (Rossi and Scappini 2012). These studies suggest that overestimation is caused by a form of measurement error known as overreporting.…”

Church Attendance, Problems of Measurement, and Interpreting Indicators: A Study of Religious Practice in the United States, 1975–2010

“…We can consider the index P m ( X ) to be a measure of the density of the participation events, meaning precisely the degree to which the matrix, or space of events, is “filled” by positive values. It follows that measured density is only a ratio between positive events and possible events; it does not refer in any way to individuals and their characteristic attendance rate (Rossi ; Rossi and Scappini ).…”

“…Frequency‐density conversion procedures similar to ours have only been used relatively recently (Gershuny :267–68; Pisati ; Presser and Chaves ; Presser and Stinson ; Woodberry ). It would be useful at this point to recall the three basic types of risk that are implicit in the mechanical application of such procedures, which are also outlined in Rossi and Scappini (). First of all, there is no guarantee that when interviewees give their answers, they will adopt the same interpretation used by the researcher in defining the meaning of the categories, the time intervals, and the characteristic frequency to be used.…”

“…The open‐ended nature of the term “nearly” means that the definition of the boundary between diligent attendance (52 Sundays) and “almost diligent” attendance is left to a subjective decision. In other words, if respondents have to “lie” about the answer as a result of their specific situation, it is likely that they will solve the dilemma by choosing the “lie” that shows them in a better light (Rossi and Scappini )…”

“…Although the validity of frequency indicators has been under discussion for some time, there is still no unanimous consensus on the matter; some researchers advocate using them (Caplow ; Hout and Fischer ; Hout and Greeley ), while others highlight their dubious level of reliability due to significant overestimation (Chaves and Cavendish ; Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves , ; Marcum ; Marler and Hadaway ; Presser and Stinson ; and more recently, Hadaway and Marler ; Presser and Chaves ; Rossi and Scappini , ). Despite the doubts that have arisen, frequency is still the most commonly used indicator.…”