Social Statistics Seminar - 4pm, 9 March: The Rise of the Nones and Religious Polarization across the US 1973-2018
| Dates: | 9 March 2021 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Webinar |
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| Organiser: | Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research |
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Social Statistics Seminars 2020/21 – March Session
The Rise of the Nones and Religious Polarization across the US 1973-2018: State-level Trends Based on Multilevel Regression and Poststratification
Dingeman Wiertz (University College London)
Join us at 4pm (GMT) on 9 March 2021!
Registration link: http://bit.ly/socstat0321
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Abstract
The American religious landscape has undergone major changes over the past decades, including a fast rise in the share of Americans reporting no religion. In addition, it is well-known that religion is unevenly distributed across the country. However, it remains unclear whether different areas have also experienced different patterns of religious change as a result of this. The prime reason is the absence of data that systematically track area-level changes in religiosity. Against this background, we apply a novel method, Multilevel Regression and Poststratification over Time (MRT), to General Social Survey data over the period 1973-2018 to obtain estimates of state-level religious trends. We focus on the share of religious “nones” and whether people frequently attend church or strongly identify with their religion, in light of claims about the polarization of the religious landscape. We validate our MRT estimates against external benchmarks, finding that our MRT estimates outperform conventional alternatives. Substantively, we find, among other things, divergence across states between 1973 and 2018 in their share of religious nones, with steeper rises in states that already started off from higher baselines. Our MRT approach can be extended to other outcomes, lower-level areas, and other group-based units, and our state-level religious trend estimates constitute a valuable resource for scholars in various fields of sociology.
About the speaker
Dingeman Wiertz is a Lecturer in Social Science and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute, University College London. His research covers topics such as civic engagement, religion, inter-ethnic relations, and segregation. More info: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=DWIER05.
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