Merging the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies: A Data File for Documenting American Religious Change

Abstract

The decennial religious congregations and membership studies are a popular data source for analyzing local religious composition and diversity, but several methodological challenges hinder merging the datasets for longitudinal analyses. In this paper, we introduce strategies for addressing four of the most serious challenges: religious mergers and schisms, changes in membership standards within certain groups, missing data and changes in county boundaries. In doing so we successfully merge the 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 collections and build new longitudinal datasets of congregational and membership counts at the state and county levels. These changes increase religious group representation from 48 to 76, reduce bias from missing data, allow for the more reliable inclusion of 20–23 million adherents in each year, and improve overall ease of use. We also document instances when corrections were not possible and alert readers to the limitations of the merged files when measuring change among certain groups. The new longitudinal files are accessible from theARDA.com.

Cross-level sociodemographic homogeneity alters individual risk for completed suicide

“…3 A reveals the standard effect for age groups. Sameness decreases suicide risk for the younger age groups ( 15 – 44 ), has little influence on the risk in middle age, and increases the risk for the oldest individuals. Ethnic and race effects are similarly complicated: For Whites and Blacks, sameness decreases individual suicide risk while for all other groups, and especially AI/ANs, the risk increases with sameness ( Fig.…”

“…Second, to avoid misspecification errors, we merged aggregated data from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, Census Geodatabase, County Population Estimates, County-to-County migration flow from the Internal Revenue Service, all provided by the Census Bureau ( 29 ) and known to be important controls in suicide analysis: percentage living in poverty, migration rate, and population density. Third, county-level counts of congregations for 236 religious organizations were obtained from the Longitudinal Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) ( 30 ) file for the most recent year available (2010), and aggregated into the Steensland et al ( 31 ) religious tradition categories (Evangelical Protestant, Mainstream Protestant, Black Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, Jewish, and Other). After listwise deletion of missing data, 7.8% of NVDRS cases and 4.67% of ACS cases were lost to the analysis (NVDRS Effective n = 61,715; ACS = 11,017,092; detail in SI Appendix , Tables S2 and S3 ).…”

Examining the county‐level political considerations associated with declining reliance on the death penalty from 1990 to 2010*

“…Information on the number of religious fundamentalists across counties was drawn from the Churches and Church Membership in the United States and the Religious Congregations and Membership studies (Bradley et al., 1992; Grammich et al., 2012; Jones et al., 2002). During each decennial measurement period, researchers contacted all of the Judeo‐Christian church bodies identified in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches , which provides a list of all major religious groups in both countries (Bacon et al., 2018). Religious groups that participated in the study were required to identify a contact person who worked with the researchers to collect information on the number of congregations, adherents, and members across counties.…”

“…We partially address this limitation by relying on the size of fundamentalist populations reported in the Bacon et al. (2018) county‐level data set. This longitudinal data set was constructed using the decennial religious reports for the period from 1980 to 2010.…”

“…To account for nonreporting over time, Bacon et al. (2018) used two missing data strategies to estimate values for 40 religious denominations that were previously missing information in the individual decennial publications. Although Bacon et al.…”