Disconnect between how much Americans say they give to church and charity versus what they actually give

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Research working with recent data on charitable and religious giving suggests there is an interesting disconnect: some people say they give more than they actually do.

A quarter of respondents in a new national study said they tithed 10 percent of their income to charity. But when their donations were checked against income figures, only 3 percent of the group gave more than 5 percent to charity…

But other figures from the Science of Generosity Survey and the 2010 General Social Survey indicate how little large numbers of people actually give to charity.

The generosity survey found just 57 percent of respondents gave more than $25 in the past year to charity; the General Social Survey found 77 percent donated more than $25, Price and Smith reported in their presentation on “Religion and Monetary Donations: We All Give Less Than We Think.”

In one indication of the gap between perception and reality, 10 percent of the respondents to the generosity survey reported tithing 10 percent of their income to charity although their records showed they gave $200 or less.

Two thoughts, more about methodological issues than the subject at hand:

1. What people say on surveys or in interviews doesn’t always match what they actually do. There are a variety of reasons for this, not all malicious or intentional. But, this leads me to thought #2…

2. I like the way some of these studies make use of multiple sources of data to find the disconnect between what people say and what they do. When looking at an important area of social life, like altruism, having multiple sources of data goes a long way. Measuring attitudes is often important in of itself but we also need data on practices and behaviors.

 

Argument: Census Bureau could better count Hispanics by focusing on origins

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As I wrote about a month ago, the Census Bureau is looking into ways to better count Hispanics in the 2020 Census. Here are a few more details:

“Many Hispanics, especially those who are immigrants, are unsure about how to respond to census questions about race because the concept of race that we use in the U.S. is not so firmly entrenched in Latin American cultures,” said Shannon Monnat, a UNLV assistant professor of sociology who studies demography…

In April the Pew Research Center published a report from a survey that verified cramming everyone together into one category was problematic.

More than half of the Pew survey respondents said they preferred to use their country of origin as an identifier, 24 percent said they would use “Hispanic” most often and 21 percent labeled themselves “American.”…

“Historically, the standard sociological practice has been to apply ‘race’ to distinctions based on physical appearance and apply ‘ethnicity’ to distinctions based on culture and language, but ethnicity now is used increasingly as an inclusive term to categorize all groups considered to share a common descent,” Monnat said. “Demographers have been predicting a much wider range of responses on census forms and increased blurring of racial categories as minority populations continue to grow and interracial marriage increases over the next several decades. The children produced from these unions will not fit neatly into any of the standard census categories.

“A more realistic approach may be to use the concept of ‘origins’ rather than the traditional concepts of race and ethnicity,” she said.

Keeping up with changing definitions is a difficult task for sociologists and demographers. And this seems like a two-step process: first, we need to know how people understand or identify themselves and then we need to get the survey questions right.

Moving toward “origins” data would be interesting. The Census has some data on this – I think this is from questions about ancestry on the long form. Here is a two paragraph description of how this was done in 2000:

Ancestry refers to a person’s ethnic origin or descent, “roots,” or heritage, or the place of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States. Some ethnic identities, such as “German” or “Jamaican,” can be traced to geographic areas outside the United States, while other ethnicities such as “Pennsylvania Dutch” or “Cajun” evolved in the United States.

The intent of the ancestry question is not to measure the degree of attachment the respondent had to a particular ethnicity. For example, a response of “Irish” might reflect total involvement in an “Irish” community or only a memory of ancestors several generations removed from the individual. A person’s ancestry is not necessarily the same as his or her place of birth; i.e., not all people of German ancestry were born in Germany (in fact, most were not).

Ancestry has its own issues.

Americans may have big houses but they don’t search for the biggest houses online

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Americans are known for having big new houses but data from Trulia suggests residents of several other countries search for bigger houses online:

But is it possible that Europeans have even more of an appetite for mega-mansions than the average American?

Trulia, an online real-estate firm based in San Francisco that recently filed for an initial public offering, has taken a look at its search traffic from abroad to see what kinds of homes foreigners typically look for on the site. The table shows that the median size of a home viewed by searchers from Holland in the second quarter of this year was 2,400 square feet. Brits and Germans looked at homes with a median size of 2,342 and 2,200 square feet respectively.

The firm then looked at the median size of home that Americans were searching for in their own backyard and discovered this was 1,854 square feet. The least space-hungry searchers of the lot in its ranking were from Argentina and Israel, which probably reflects the fact that folk in these countries tend to buy apartments rather than houses in cities such as Miami and New York.

So is it time to ditch the McMansion moniker? No so fast. Foreigners using Trulia may well be looking for holiday homes in the United States, which implies they are relatively wealthy and can thus afford much bigger abodes than more typical buyers. And Trulia can only identify the location of a searcher, not someone’s nationality. So it’s likely that, say, American military personnel based abroad and looking to come home are a part of its “foreign” traffic. It will take much more data than this to undermine the foundations of the McMansion story.

It is too bad that Trulia doesn’t have or isn’t releasing other data that might help us figure out more about these foreign searchers.

I am intrigued by the idea of a “McMansion story” this post suggests is present around the world. Americans do have big houses compared to other Western nations – however, Australia has even larger new houses. Are these larger new homes in America looked at all negatively, seen as wastes of resources and signs of excessive consumption (like McMansions), or are there some who would want similar houses in their own countries?

What television show will assume the role of “sociological experiment of our time”?

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MTV’s Jersey Shore will run only one more season. This reminded me that I have seen several sites refer to the show’s sociological nature. Two examples:

1. From Gawker.  A number of their recaps have included this claim about the show (including this March 9, 2012 post): “the greatest sociological experiment of our time.” As it is probably meant to be, this is quite hyperbolic.

2. From the New York Post:

We are gathered here this evening to celebrate and memorialize the death of an era in MTV history: The Jersey Shore era. As both a former employee of Lord Viacom MTV Networks (full disclosure: from 2008 – 2011) and a viewer, it feels as though a chapter in its life has come to a close. The pages have turned and the sun is setting on our tanned up guido friends. And for a few years, this sociological experiment defined MTV and defined the audience it cultivated. We all watched in slackjawed horror/glee the day it all began, and now we must lay it to rest. And so with it goes the days of MTV’s most polarizing programming. Let us reflect.

I’m not quite sure why this show was repeatedly tied to sociology. Perhaps some simply couldn’t understand why the show had good ratings considering the content. Perhaps it is because a lot of people wanted to hold up the show as a mirror to make claims about the excesses and ills of our larger society.

But we could also ask which shows might take up this spot in the future. I hear that Honey Boo Boo character is getting a lot of attention but there is no shortage of reality TV shows that portray interesting characters in interesting situations. Was Jersey Shore really more emblematic of American life than other shows?

Self-driving cars mainly about making roads safer?

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Here is an argument for why we will eventually move, like Nevada has already done and California is doing now, toward self-driving cars: they are safer.

The Economist notes that about 90 percent of traffic accidents are caused by human error, meaning that if humans are taken out of the process, there’s a strong probably that accident rates will plummet.

Even so, the bill requires the cars to have a flesh-and-blood human being behind the wheel if something goes wrong.

“It sounds space age, but it’s almost here,” Padilla told the San Jose Mercury News. “If we can reduce the number of accidents, that alone is worth doing this bill.”…

Despite the bill’s widespread political support, some quarters have voiced reservations, particularly over what happens if driverless cars crash and lawsuits are filed. “This does not protect adequately the manufacturers for liability concerns,” Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers spokesman Dan Gage told the Mercury News.

Safety is the trump argument these days in American politics: if you can argue a policy or change will save lives, perhaps even just a few, this is a powerful rationale.

I still wonder how long it will take for drivers to adjust to this and whether everyone would want to give up driving. Part of the appeal of driving in American culture is that it allows individuals to control their destiny, decide where to go and then drive yourself there. If cars were driverless, what would there be to do, particularly if the driver still has to sit behind the wheel in case something goes wrong? Will the thrill of driving disappear?

As this article notes and I’ve noted before, Google has been a key actor in pushing this technology forward.

Reminder to drivers: using all the possible space to merge is more efficient

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A large road expansion project is taking place near our house and this has led to multiple busy intersections having lane closures where two lanes merge into one. As often happens, drivers in these situations often get amazingly territorial, deliberately moving over to block the closing lane hundreds of feet even before the lane is closed.

Here is the problem with this behavior: these protectors of the lanes are actually making the whole process more inefficient. Traffic moves like waves. Not everyone starts driving at once when they can so changes filter down through a line of cars. Therefore, making one single long line takes a lot longer to get through than having two lines half the size that merge at the end. We could all get to our destinations quicker if people could stop worrying that someone is getting ahead of them. People successfully merge from two lanes into one on highway ramps all the time so why can’t they don’t it construction situations?

A note: having two lanes that are supposed to merge into one is a lot different situation than one described in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. At the infamous and congested Circle Interchange, there are more dangerous situations where people try to cut into two dedicated lanes meant for another highway (say going east on the Eisenhower Expressway and getting off to exit for both the Kennedy and Dan Ryan) from a third lane that is headed in a different direction. As the article suggests, these late attempts at cutting in can be quite dangerous.

If you want to read more about this, I highly recommend Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic.

New art exhibit on suburban houses depicts suburban isolation

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A new art exhibit in Arlington, Virginia appears to trade in a common critique of American suburbs:

My House is not my House is an ongoing series of animations dealing with themes of isolation, suburbia, and Western culture. Nature tries to carve out an existence amongst these seemingly unoccupied homes while time passes and nothing seems to change. The animations not only speak about the relationships between humans and nature, but also about the way humans relate with each other. The series began as a pair of animated illustrations, expanding on Michael Salter’s work depicting life in America. In 2010, the animations were expanded and became a series of four high definition “digital paintings.” My House is not my House is a collaboration that is carried out over the internet, the narratives are generated together through email and digital storyboards. Illustrations are by Salter, animation and sound by Coleman.

Are there any serious artists, accepted by the critical art community, who paint positive scenes of suburbia?

Analyst looks at “racial breakdown of [presidential election] polls”

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An analyst for RealClearPolitics takes a look at possible issues with the racial breakdown in the samples of  presidential election polls. A few of the issues:

First, as Chait repeatedly concedes, we don’t know what the ultimate electorate will look like this November. That really should be the end of the argument — if we don’t know what the racial breakdown is going to be, it’s hard to criticize the pollsters for under-sampling minorities. After all, almost all pollsters weight their base sample of adults to CPS (current population survey) estimates to ensure the base sample reflects the actual population; after that, the data simply are what they are.

It’s true that the minority share of the electorate increased every year from 1996 through 2008. But there’s a reason that 1996 is always used as a start date: After declining every election from 1980 through 1988, the white share of the vote suddenly ticked up two points in 1992. In other words, these things aren’t one-way ratchets (and while there is no H. Ross Perot this year, the underlying white working-class angst that propelled his candidacy is very much present, as writers on the left repeatedly have observed)…

“The U.S. Census Bureau allows for multiple responses when it asks respondents what race they are, and Gallup attempts to replicate the Census in that respect. While most pollsters ask two separate questions about race and Hispanic ancestry, Gallup goes a step further, asking five separate questions about race. They ask respondents to answer whether or not they consider themselves White; Black or African American; Asian; Native American or Alaska Native; and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”

In other words, how you ask the question could impact how people self-identify with regard to race and ethnicity, which could in turn affect how your weighted data look. This is a polling issue that will likely become more significant as the nation grows more diverse, and more multi-racial.

Trying to figure out who exactly is going to vote is a tricky proposition and it is little surprise that different polling organizations have slightly different figures.

I hope people don’t see stories like this and conclude that polls can’t be trusted after all. Polling is not an exact science; all polls contain small margins of error. However, polling is so widely used because it is incredibly difficult to capture information about whole populations. Even one of the most comprehensive surveys we have, the US Census, was only able to get about 70-75% cooperation and that was with a large amount of money and workers. Websites like RealClearPolitics are helpful here because you can see averages of the major polls which can help smooth out some of their differences.

A final note: this is another reminder that measuring race and ethnicity is difficult. As noted above, the Census Bureau and some of these polling organizations use different measures and therefore get different results. Of course, because race and ethnicity are fluid, the measures have to change over time.

Could Condoleezza Rice run for president…as a single women?

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After her speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, some suggested Condoleezza Rice could make good presidential material. Some factors might not be in her favor: she is a woman (we have elected a black president but not a woman) and she has an interesting background that includes being a professor, provost, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State (not exactly a traditional path to the White House). However, I wondered about another factor: could a single person become President?

While more Americans are living alone and marriage might be pursued by some people more than others, Americans seem to prefer national leaders who are married and have families. Many might ask: how could a single president understand the plight of families? If the single candidate didn’t have children, what would they know about raising children?

Since at least the late 1930s, Gallup has asked about what kind of president Americans would be willing to vote for. A few of the results:

The results are based on a June 7-10 Gallup poll, updating a question Gallup first asked in 1937 in reference to a female, Jewish, or Catholic candidate and has asked periodically since then, with additional candidate characteristics added to the list. The question has taken on added relevance in recent years as a more diverse group of candidates has run for president. This year, Mitt Romney is poised to become the first Mormon to win a major-party presidential nomination. However, Americans’ willingness to vote for a Mormon has changed little in 45 years.

Notwithstanding the Mormon trend, Gallup’s history on this question shows growing acceptance for all other types of candidates over time. That includes atheists, whose acceptability as candidates surpassed 50% for the first time last summer but have typically ranked at the bottom of the list whenever the question has been asked.

In 1937, less than half of Americans said they would vote for a Jewish or female presidential candidate; now 90% or more would. The same applies to voting for a black candidate compared with 1958. Over time, Americans’ acceptance of blacks and women as candidates has increased the most…

Americans of all political party affiliations are nearly unanimous in saying they would vote for a black, female, Catholic, Hispanic, or Jewish president. Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say they would vote for a presidential candidate who is gay, Muslim, or an atheist. Republicans, in turn, are more likely to say they would vote for a Mormon.

As far as this page suggests, Gallup has not asked about whether candidates should be married or have a family.

It would be interesting to see this play out…

Argument: McMansions are turning Queens into Brooklyn

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A writer argues Queens, New York is being ruined by McMansions:

Then one day, the McMansions came roaring in. Progress! People cut down trees, bricked up laws and built their houses right up to the property line. Children started “playing” on their computers indoors. They started getting heavier as the utility companies grew richer because oversized homes use a lot more energy than smaller homes with trees close by to shade them. I sure hope the utility companies are sending those McMansion owners holiday greeting cards to thank them for their extra business. I’d say they owe them at least that much.

More and more, green lawns in Queens are transforming into the cement sidewalks of Brooklyn. One of the reasons that Queens homeowners are paving their lawns is because the multiple families dwelling in those roomy McMansions are creating a shortage of parking spaces. What’s the solution? Pave your lawn so you can transform it into a front driveway. Or, maybe they don’t like grass. Why move to Queens then? There’s always Brooklyn. Brooklyn already has lots of cement sidewalks. They even have cafes! Wouldn’t it be easier to find a setting that suits your needs than dwelling in a setting you have to transform?

This is not my neck of the woods but I have a few thoughts about this:

1. It sounds like there are a lot of teardown McMansions in Queens.

2. Blaming McMansions for the rising weight of children seems silly. Only kids who live in McMansions are sitting inside more?

3. I wonder if it is really McMansions that are the issue here or that change is coming to Queens. The main point of the argument is that this writer doesn’t want Queens to be like Brooklyn. Presumably, it should remain distinct which includes having different kinds of housing. McMansions could be just a symptom of larger concerns about neighborhood change.