The Benford law behavior of the religious activity data

Abstract

An important aspect of religious association is that adherents, as part of their religious duty, carry out various activities. One religious group known for keeping the elaborate records of day-to-day activities of its members is the Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs)-a worldwide Christian religious group. We analyze the historical records of the country-wide data associated with twelve different religious activities of JWs to see if there are any patterns in the distribution of the first digits as predicted by Benford's law. This law states that the first digits of numbers in data sets are not uniformly distributed but often, not always, follow a logarithmic distribution such that the numbers beginning with smaller digits appear more frequently than those with larger ones. We find that the data on religious activities like peak publishers, pioneer publishers, baptizations, public meetings, congregations, bible studies, time spent in door-to-door contacts, attendances at the memorial services, total literature and individual magazines distributed, new subscriptions and back-calls received excellently conforms to Benford's law.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, 5 tables, 57 reference

Breakdown of Benford’s law for birth data

“…the religious adhesion. Such data must be taken with caution [30,31,37,38], but the orders of magnitude are usually trustworthy [39]- [41]. The most important community, from the religion point of view, according to the census sources is the Eastern-Orthodox (86.8%).…”

“…In this paper, our goal is to investigate whether Benford's law holds, on long birth time series, distinguishing between the religious adhesion (Eastern Orthodox or not) of families in Romania for a time interval extending from Jan. 01, 1905 till Dec. 31,2001, i.e. over 97 years or 35 429 days.…”

Benford's Law as an Indicator of Survey Reliability—can We Trust Our Data?

“…This rule, however commonly used by tax authorities to detect fraud, is still not widely applied in social sciences . Authors who have used it to evaluate (survey) data quality include Judge and Schechter (), mainly for agricultural data; Nigrini and Miller (), for hydrological data; Sandron (), for population numbers; Mir (), for religious data; Ausloos et al . (), for long‐term birth numbers; Fu et al .…”

“…This rule, however commonly used by tax authorities to detect fraud, is still not widely applied in social sciences. 3 Authors who have used it to evaluate (survey) data quality include Judge and Schechter (2009), mainly for agricultural data; Nigrini and Miller (2007), for hydrological data; Sandron (2002), for population numbers; Mir (2014), for religious data; Ausloos et al (2015), for long-term birth numbers; Fu et al (2007), for image forensics; and Swanson, Cho and Eltinge (2003), for consumption expenditures. Additionally, further studies exist that discuss the use of Benford´s law as a lie detector (Gauvrit et al, 2017), to detect incorrect information of countries regarding their effort to combat money laundering (Deleanu, 2017), or to assess the reliability of financial reports in developing countries (Shi et al, 2018).…”

Benford’s law predicted digit distribution of aggregated income taxes: the surprising conformity of Italian cities and regions

“…Furthermore, the law represents the only distribution of leading digits invariant under scale and base transformations [8][9][10][11]. Secondly, numerous data sets from diverse fields conform to the law [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. For an exhaustive list refer to [27].…”