Tag Archives: data

Evidence from the past and future that suggests religious revival is not happening in the United States

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I appreciate this part of Ryan Burge’s approach to examining whether a religious resurgence is happening in the US: he looks at past patterns and he considers possible changes in the future.

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First, the present data:

The General Social Survey, for instance, reported a steady rise in the “nones” between the early 1990s and 2020. In 2018, the figure was 23%, rising to 28% in 2021. The two most recent estimates are slightly lower — 27% in 2022 and 25% in 2024. Similarly, the “headline finding” from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey was that both the decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated have paused in recent years.

As Burge and others have noted, recent data seems to show a stopping/slowing/plateauing of two trends: fewer people affiliating with Christian traditions and more Americans identified as “religious nones.”

But these patterns are also related to aging and whose activity researchers can examine. Burge next turns to the future:

When you compare generations, the pattern is obvious. The youngest members of the Silent Generation were born in the early 1940s, and just 7% report no religious affiliation. In less than a decade, they — and a growing share of Baby Boomers (18% unaffiliated) — will disappear from survey samples.

Meanwhile, millennials are moving solidly into middle age, and 36% of them say they have no religion. Generation Z, all of whom will soon be adults, are even less religious: 43% are nones. That’s 25 points higher than the Boomers they’re replacing. So if the overall share of nones sits around 28% now, it will inevitably rise as generational turnover continues.

Could millennials and Gen Z find God in the years ahead? Possibly — but it would require a transformation unlike anything seen in modern times. Roughly 10 million millennials would have to reaffiliate with religion, followed by another 18 million Gen Zers. There’s no sign of that happening in any dataset.

In other words, for the percent of people in the United States to identify as Christian in the future at the same rates as now would require more young people to become Christian. For the percentage of Christians to grow, even more religious change would need to take place.

By looking at past, present, and future possibilities, Burge concludes: “I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents.”

When trying to understand what is happening in a social group or society, one data point or set of evidence is often not enough to fully understand what is happening. Patterns can change over time or the way we understand the world can change over time but a compelling case needs to be made. Seizing on new evidence that does not fit what we know about something might hint at significant change – or it could be a sampling outlier. Good steady research can help reveal these patterns even if there are multiple actors wishing that we could have identifiable patterns more quickly.

Quantifiable running + big cities = “run-every-streeters”

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If you like to track your running and live in a large city, you could try to run every street:

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What began as a means for Barbosa to get his muscles moving following an injury has since grown into a year-plus pursuit, spurred on by the 25-year-old’s inclination to get to know more of the city after moving to the area more than three years ago.

As of the year’s end, Barbosa had just over 79% of Chicago’s more than 4,000 miles of street covered. He plans to finish by the spring, then eventually move on to other cities and repeat the venture on a new maze of streets…

He isn’t the only one. For years, from coast to coast, “run-every-streeters” have been taking on their version of the challenge, turning their metropolitan areas into bona fide treadmills. In 2018, a man ran every street in San Francisco over a span of 46 days. A couple years ago, another runner spent the better part of 12 months jogging every street in Manhattan, a 750-mile endeavor…

But he does like to expand his horizons. He started to use running as a means to explore new neighborhoods and the more he ran, he questioned just how much ground he was covering. Barbosa found an app to track his progress and when he saw there was a leaderboard of others doing the same, with the top contender hovering at about 55% of the city completed at the time, he thought, “‘I wonder if I can beat him?’” He’s been gaining traction since, both in mileage — and followers.

It would be interesting to know whether this was a thing before the ease of tracking movement via apps and GPS. It would be one thing to track running on a paper map. This is certainly doable. On the other hand, if a phone or a watch will track someone with no effort, now all the participant has to do is move. They could do their normal run or walk or bicycling and their route is captured. Their movement is quickly mapped and quantified. They just have to follow through with moving along every street.

Furthermore, they can compare their results to others. A leaderboard is referenced above. Does this mean the app or tracker is providing every street/mile as a goal? This is another step toward more people covering every street: their movement is tracked but it can become a competition to meet this goal. There will be a winner!

Any runner want to take on every mile in cities with more square miles than Chicago, like Nashville or Jacksonville or Juneau?

Some difficulties in directly studying the effects of social media use on mental health

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As more actors express concerns about how social media use affecting the mental health of “children and teens,” this article suggests it can be hard to directly measure this link:

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It doesn’t help that mental health is influenced by many factors, and no single treatment works for every person. “It’s not as straightforward as: What is the right antibiotic for that ear infection?” said Megan Moreno, a scientist and pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health at the American Academy of Pediatrics…

Among the reasons that make it difficult to isolate the role of social media in kids’ mental health is that the relationship between mental health and tech use is a two-way street, the panel from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said. A person’s mental state might influence how he or she uses the platform, which in turn affects his or her state of mind. 

Randomized, controlled studies on whether social media caused the mental-health crisis are impractical because exposure to social media is now everywhere, researchers say. In addition, platforms are constantly changing their features, hobbling efforts to run long-term studies, they say.

A decade ago, Munmun De Choudhury, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, was part of a team that showed that groups promoting disordered eating were skirting Instagram’s moderation efforts. De Choudhury says that such studies probably would be impossible today because social-media companies no longer allow access to public data, or charge hefty fees for it…

Research into the roots of distress in young people has found that other factors—bullying, or lack of family support—have stronger associations with mental-health outcomes, compared with social-media use.

These are different issues. This includes having access to data from platforms as well as data over time. Additionally, it takes work to separate out different influences on mental health. Randomized controlled trials that could help with this are difficult to put together in this situation. Other factors are shown to influence mental health.

Some think there is enough data to make the argument about social media use influencing mental health. For example, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts together evidence in his latest book The Anxious Generation. His approach is one that social scientists can take: there seem to be consistent patterns over time and other factors do not seem to account as well for the outcomes observed. And if there is a growing consensus across studies and scholars, this is another way for scientific findings to advance.

This is an ongoing situation as policy efforts and research efforts follow sometimes intertwining paths. If a state restricts social media use for teenagers and then mental health issues drop, would this count as evidence for social media causing mental health distress?

The availability of data online for social science research

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While in graduate school, I learned that data for sociology research could be found online. The Census had a website. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research had a website. Social media platforms were blooming with Myspace offering lots of activity to examine and Facebook launching. Still today in 2024, I continue to make use of both of these streams of data:

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  1. Datasets available online. The ability to look up accurate and detailed statistics is hard to overvalue. For example, I regularly access the Census website and The Association of Religion Data Archives for information. I experienced the flip-side in graduate school as well. On one research assistant project, I looked through World Health Organization statistics published in thick bound volumes by the United Nations. Presumably, some of these books still exist but the expectation is that such information should be available online.
  2. Online activity as data. With the growth of the World Wide Web and social media, sociologists and others use what is online as research data. I have published a few works that draw on websites and online materials to examine patterns. Of course, online activity is not necessarily the same as offline activity but I think the so-called “virtual world” and “real world” overlap more than people sometimes think. Studying online activity can tell us about important online patterns and offline patterns.

On the other hand, I did not have any specific training in graduate school about how to access this data online. Navigating websites and datasets online requires experience and know-how. Developing datasets from online activity takes work. A lot of methodological writing and advice can apply to online data but collecting data online can be its own process. What about having programming skills to speed up data collection and analysis?

I am sure there is a lot of research to come that will use both of these data streams to good effect. I look forward to the findings about society and social relationships to come.

Measuring religious affiliation at the county level and the variation within counties

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I was looking at the methodology for the “Where Should You Live?” interactive feature in the New York Times from November 2021 and noticed this section on religion and place:

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Why isn’t there a checkbox for ____?

There are many metrics that we wanted to include but for which we couldn’t find data.

Religion was at the top of that list. The Public Religion Research Institute sent us breakdowns of religious affiliation by county. But some counties contain dozens of places. Cook County, for instance, includes Chicago and is home to a large number of Black Protestants. The county also includes Chicago’s northern suburbs, where very few Black people live. Assigning the same statistics to every place within Cook County would have been misleading.

(We did use county- or metropolitan-level statistics for a handful of metrics — but only when we thought values were unlikely to vary significantly within those areas.)

This explanation makes some sense given the data available. Counties can have significant variation within them, particularly when they are large counties and/or have a lot of different municipalities. The example of Cook County illustrates the possible variation within one county: not only does the county contain Chicago, there are scores of other suburbs with a variety of histories and demographics.

On the other hand, it is a shame to not be able to include any measure of religion. People do not necessarily gather with similar religious adherents in their own community. People regularly travel for religious worship and community. There are Black Protestant congregations in Cook County outside of Chicago even as they may not be evenly distributed across the county. Because this religion data is at the county level, perhaps it could be weighted less in the selection of places to live and still included as a potential factor.

This also speaks to a need for more systematic data on religious affiliation on a smaller scale than counties. This requires a tremendous amount of work and data but it would be a useful research tool.

Searching for well-presented weather forecasts; example of Weather Underground

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Finding good and well-presented weather forecasts can be difficult. What provider supplies accurate information? Use a widget, app, or website? And who puts it together best on the screen? I have settled on Weather Underground because they present data in this format when you look at the ten day forecast:

This is a lot of information in one graphic. Here is what I think it does well:

  1. The top still provides the basic information many people might seek: conditions and high and low temperatures. A quick scan of the top quickly reveals all of this information.
  2. The amount of information available each day is helpfully shown in four sets of graphs below the header information. I do not just get a high and low temperature; I can see this over an hourly chart (no need to click on hourly information). I do not just get a notice about precipitation; I can see when rain or snow will fall. I do not just get a summary of wind speed; I can see if that wind speed is consistent, when it is rising or falling, and the direction.
  3. Connected to #2, it is easy to see patterns across days. Will that rain continue into the next day? Is the temperature spike or drop going to last? The longitudinal predictions are easy to see and I can see more details than just the summary info at the top.
  4. Also connected to #2, I can see how these four different paths of data line up with each other at the same days and times.

In sum, I think Weather Underground does a great job of showing a lot of information in an easy-to-decipher format. This may be too much information for many people, especially if you want quick information for now or the next few hours. But, if you want to think about the next few days and upcoming patterns, this one graphic offers a lot.

Trying to use statistics in a post-evidence political world

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Ahead of the presidential debate last night, my Statistics class came up with a short list of guidelines for making sense of the statistics that were sure to be deployed in the discussion. Here is my memory of those strategies:

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  1. What is the source of the data?
  2. How was the statistic obtained (sample, questions asked, etc.)?
  3. Is the number unreasonable or too good/too bad to be true?
  4. How is the statistic utilized in an argument or what are the implications of the statistic?

These are good general tips for approaching any statistic utilized in the public realm. Asking good questions about data helps us move beyond accepting all numbers because they are numbers or rejecting all numbers because they can be manipulated. Some statistics are better than others and some are deployed more effectively than others.

But, after watching the debate, I wonder if these strategies make much sense in our particular political situation. Numbers were indeed used by both candidates. This suggests they still have some value. But, it would be easy for a viewer to leave thinking that statistics are not trustworthy. If every number can be debated – methods, actual figures, implications – depending on political view or if every number can be answered with another number that may or may not be related, what numbers can be trusted? President Trump throws out unverified numbers, challenges other numbers, and looks for numbers that boost him.

When Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” in 2005, he hinted at this attitude toward statistics:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word …

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President [George W. Bush] because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? …

Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

Combine numbers with ideology and what statistics mean can change dramatically.

This does not necessarily mean a debate based solely on numbers would lead to clearer answers. I recall some debate exchanges in previous years where candidates argued they each had studies to back up their side. In that instance, what is a viewer to decide (probably not having read any of the studies)? Or, if science is politicized, where do numbers fit? Or, there might be instances where a good portion of the electorate thinks statistics based arguments are not appropriate compared to other lines of reasoning. And the issue may not be that people or candidates are innumerate; indeed, they may know numbers all too well and seek to exploit how they are used.

Census cutting short time going door to door

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The Census Bureau will not be able to go door to door as long as planned and this could affect the quality of the data at the end:

building door entrance exit

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Attempts by the bureau’s workers to conduct in-person interviews for the census will end on Sept. 30 — not Oct. 31, the end date it indicated in April would be necessary to count every person living in the U.S. given major setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic. Three Census Bureau employees, who were informed of the plans during separate internal meetings Thursday, confirmed the new end date with NPR. All of the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs…

Former Census Bureau Director John Thompson warns that with less time, the bureau would likely have to reduce the number of attempts door knockers would make to try to gather information in person. The agency may also have to rely more heavily on statistical methods to impute the data about people living in households they can’t reach.

“The end result would be [overrepresentation] for the White non-Hispanic population and greater undercounts for all other populations including the traditionally hard-to-count,” Thompson wrote in written testimony for a Wednesday hearing on the census before the House Oversight and Reform Committee…

Moving up the end date from Oct. 31 for door knocking is likely to throw the census, already upended by months of delays, deeper into turmoil as hundreds of thousands of the bureau’s door knockers try to figure out how to conduct in-person interviews as many states grapple with growing coronavirus outbreaks in the middle of hurricane season.

Beyond the political football that the Census can be, Census data is important for researchers, residents, and political leaders. Not being able to go through the full data process and having to impute more data means that more of the final counts will need to be estimated. Since the decennial Census tries to get data from every household in the United States, it has some of the most comprehensive data. Lower counts, less time, COVID-19, political wrangling – may this not disturb useful and important data results.

Poor Census response rate in neighborhoods with fleeing New Yorkers

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Here is another consequence of city residents leaving for other places during COVID-19: absent New York residents are not filling out Census 2020 forms at a good rate.

chart close up data desk

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Only 46 percent of Upper East Side households have filled out their census forms, according to a June 25 report circulated by the Department of City Planning’s chief demographer, Joseph J. Salvo — well below the neighborhood’s final response rate in 2010, and short of the current citywide rate of almost 53 percent…

Even if New Yorkers have asked the Postal Service to forward mail to their second homes, census forms are addressed to the household, not the individual, which — unless New Yorkers pay for premium forwarding — prevents the post office from including them with the forwarded mail…

Officials hope that many of the coronavirus evacuees will return by the end of October, the new extended deadline for final responses to the census. But with Manhattan parents now enrolling children in schools outside the city, it is not clear that the evacuees will return to New York City in time…

The pandemic has prompted census outreach workers to adjust their tactics, especially in trying to reach undocumented immigrants and residents in illegal housing, who may be fearful of sharing information with the government. In the heavily immigrant neighborhoods of North Corona and East Elmhurst, outreach workers have approached New Yorkers while they wait in lines at food distribution sites, for example.

A lot of effort goes into conducting the decennial census and the data collected is helpful to many. Trying to boost response rates to surveys in a world awash in data collection is a difficult task without a global pandemic. But, I imagine this might lead to some interesting lessons about data collection. Researchers need to have some flexibility in all cases as circumstances can change and plans may go awry. This could be a helpful story about how a large organization adapted in a difficult situation and maybe even made future data collection more robust.

While the article mentions the potential consequences for New York City, there is another consequence of the movement of people: would these wealthy New Yorkers boost the Census numbers elsewhere, provided that they fill out the forms about residing in other locations? Granted, they would still have to fill out a Census form but others might do that for them (if they are living with others) or they might fill out a form once they are more settled in.

Using and interpreting alternative data sources to examine COVID-19 impact

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In a world full of data, businesses, investors, and others have access to newer sources of information that can provide insights into responses to COVID-19:

For instance, Angus says that monitoring China’s internet throughout the pandemic showed how industrial plants in the worst-affected regions—which operate servers and computers—shut down during the outbreak. In the last few weeks, as the emergency abated, things have started crawling back to normalcy, even if we are still far from pre-Covid-19 levels, and the evidence might be polluted by plants being restarted just to hit government-imposed power consumption targets. “China is not normal yet,” Angus says. The country’s internet latency suggests that “recovery is happening in China, but there are still a lot of people who must be facing at-home-life for their activities.”…

Combining data from vessel transponders with satellite images, he has periodically checked how many oil tankers are in anchorage in China, unable to deliver their cargo—an intimation both of how well China’s ports are functioning amid the pandemic, and of how well industrial production is keeping up.

Madani also relies on TomTom’s road traffic data for various Chinese and Italian cities to understand how they are affected by quarantines and movement restrictions. “What we’ve seen over the past two weeks is a big revival in congestion,” he says. “There’s more traffic going on now in China, in the big cities, apart from Wuhan.”…

Pollution data is another valuable source of information. Over the past weeks, people on Twitter have been sharing satellite images of various countries, showing that pollution levels are dropping across the industrialised world as a result of coronavirus-induced lockdowns. But where working-from-home twitteratis see a poetic silver lining, Madani sees cold facts about oil consumption.

Three quick thoughts:

1. Even with all of this data, interpreting it is still an important task. People could look at similar data and come to similar conclusions. Or, they might have access to one set of data and not another piece and then draw different conclusions. This becomes critical when people today want data-driven responses or want to back up their position with data. Simply having data is not enough.

2. There is publicly available data – with lots of charts and graphs going around in the United States about cases – and then there is data that requires subscriptions, connections, insider information. Who has access to what data still matters.

3. We have more data than ever before and yet this does not necessarily translate into less anxiety or more preparation regarding certain occurrences. Indeed, more information might make things worse for some.

In sum, we can know more about the world than ever before but we are still working on ways to utilize and comprehend that information that might have been unthinkable decades ago.