Regional Religiosity

We talked about data on religions last year, and even had an example where a community indicator on religion told important information about the kind of community people lived in. With the recent emphasis on religion and voting in the primary elections in the United States presidential race, this map on regionalism and religiosity may be interesting.



There are other maps that use similar data to describe religious adherents at the county level in the United States. This map shows percent of the population that is Jewish, and this one Muslim, and this one Catholic; they're part of a series of maps found at the Glenmary Research Center.

The methodology of the research, also with some cautionary notes, is available here.

Someone else recreated the map using this set of data and methodology, which he explains along with the coding he used. He says, "The one advantage of my SAS/Graph map is that you can hover your mouse over the counties, and see the county name & the numeric value!"

For more data at an international level, you might find this interesting.

Do you include indicators of religiosity or religious service attendance as part of your community indicators project? I think it might be interesting to see which communities do, and if there is a geographical pattern in those communities that consider religious beliefs a critical measure of the quality of life in their community.

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Indicators of Spirituality

A Call for Papers crossed my inbox recently and got me to thinking about indicators of spirituality as part of quality-of-life measurements. First, here's the call for papers:

APPLIED RESEARCH IN QUALITY OF LIFE: OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF QUALITY OF LIFE STUDIES – ISQOLS
www.isqols.org

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST IN A SPECIAL EDITION ON SPIRITUALITY, RELIGION & QOL

Professors Mark Peterson, Dave Webb and Rick Sawatzky would like to invite authors to submit a one-page expression of interest for a special edition of ARQOL focusing on the theme Spirituality, Religion and QOL.

Focus of special edition: Our goal as co-editors of this special edition is to advance knowledge in the area by bringing together in one forum the latest thinking in the area.

While we invite expressions of interest relating to any aspect of Spirituality, Religion and QOL, we are particularly interested in receiving papers that in the context of QOL explore the conceptual structure and subsequent operationalization of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religiosity’.

Who can submit? We welcome contributions from the many disciplines represented in the ISQOLS database.

Publication consideration is not restricted to current ISQOLS members but it will be a condition of publication that authors be members of ISQOLS at the time of publication.

Please submit an electronic copy of your one-page extended abstract by 28 March 2008.

We've mentioned indicators of religious attendance and spirituality before, most notably in this article on data sources about religions and this discussion of how Pikes Peak used indicators on religion to combat erroneous perceptions of their community.

However, neither discussion really captured the dimension of spirituality as a measure of the quality of an individual's life, or how you could develop indicators to measure such a thing on a community-wide basis. I'm not sure what's out there in this arena -- just a very quick look brought me to George Barna's The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators, a 1996 book I haven't yet read (but I ordered a copy just to see what the author had to say.)

Has anyone explored spirituality as a dimension in your quality of life indicators? Have you included it in surveys of happiness? Is this an important aspect of community indicators that we ought to be exploring (noting that at the time of this post, it's the beginning of the New Hampshire primaries in selecting candidates for the next American president, a contest in which religion at least has played a significant role to date.)

Thoughts, anyone?

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Pikes Peak Quality of Life Indicators

Back in March of 2005, I had the opportunity to talk with some concerned community leaders in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Pikes Peak United Way was looking into creating a community indicators report, and we had a wonderful conversation with people throughout the community on how open access to shared data could help improve the quality of life in the area.

Now the United Way has released the 2007 Quality of Life Indicators for the Pikes Peak Region (PDF) report, and it looks marvelous. What's been interesting about the report is the way it just got used to refute stereotypes promulgated by The New York Times.

The story, as told in today's Colorado Confidential, goes something like this:

The New York Times travel guide featured Manitou Springs, an apparently charming hippie-haven kind of place. Here's what they said:

Manitou is also defined by what it is not — its neighbor Colorado Springs, a sprawling, chain-stored center of conservative evangelical Christianity looming just beyond the Garden of the Gods, a 1,300 acre array of Gaudíesque red-rock formations that acts as a sort of buffer between the towns.

“Manitou is very different from Colorado Springs,” said a soft-spoken Manitou restaurant manager, Frog Rainbowstar (not quite his real name — that, according to his Colorado driver’s license, is Purplefrog Eightoak Rainbowstar).

Colorado Springs wasn't going to take that description lying down. The Colorado Springs Business Journal replied with an open letter to the New York Times telling them just what kind of community Colorado Springs was. The proof was in the indicators.

In the Quality of Life Indicators report, in a section called "Fostering Community Engagement," was an indicator on religious engagement. Turns out that Colorado Springs had lower church membership than Denver, or Colorado, or the United States as a whole. Rather than a "chain-stored center of conservative evangelical Christianity," Colorado Springs could be described in a number of different ways, including as "a bustling metropolis [that] has approximately two more patents registered per 10,000 people than the State of Colorado or the United States as a whole."

We've talked about using data on religious activity as part of a community indicators report before, and Colorado Springs used The Association of Religion Data Archives for their data.

All in all, this is an interesting way to use community data, coming on the heels of a highly successful first indicators report. Comments?

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Data on Religions

One interesting data source available is from the The Association of Religion Data Archives. Data sets available include religious affiliation in one of 149 religious bodies at county-level specifics. Survey information is also available on religious beliefs, as well as demographic shifts over time, the Baylor Religion Survey, QuickStats, national profiles from the World Values Survey, and more.

Links on the site take you to a number of research sites, including the Hartford Institute for Religion Research (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/) and the National Study of Youth and Religion (http://www.youthandreligion.org/), as well as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://pewforum.org/).

Why is this data useful? ChildTrends points out in its survey on religiosity that religion impacts society and child well-being in a number of ways. Certainly religion impacts public life and public policy. A number of studies have looked at religion and health, and religious beliefs and perceptions of quality of life.

In addition, faith institutions are arguably a sizable part of the social capital of a community and play a major role in its social infrastructure.

And yet religion or religous beliefs don't usually appear in community indicators projects. At least I don't know of one that includes religion or faith institutions in its measurement set. Is there a good reason for excluding religion from community indicator projects? Do you know of a community that includes it?

(Just for fun, I looked at a listing of statistical resources for the state of Utah, in which [of all states] religion has an unabashedly and undeniably significant impact on the community. Of the resources listed, religion shows up in global compendiums of international statistics, and even in a national historical document, but doesn't appear as a subject listing in any state or local data profiles. Interesting.)

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