The Measure of American Religious Traditions: Theoretical and Measurement Considerations

• Published in: Social forces Vol. 91; no. 1; pp. 65 - 73
• Main Authors: Woodberry, Robert D., Park, Jerry Z., Kellstedt, Lyman A., Regnerus, Mark D., Steensland, Brian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill, NC Oxford University Press 01.09.2012; University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: 90TH ANNIVERSARY REFLECTIONS; Baptists; Catholicism; Christianity; Church Membership; Classification; Conservatism; Correlation; Economic Problems; Evangelicalism; Evangelism; General Social Survey; Hispanics; Identification and classification; Ideology; Islam; Measurement; Measures; Methodological Problems; Political Attitudes; Political Movements; Politics; Polls & surveys; Protestant theology; Protestantism; Protestants; Religion; Religions; Religious Cultural Groups; Religious Factors; Religious identity; Religious Movements; Religious organizations; Social aspects; Social Attitudes; Social forces; Social groups; Social sciences; Social Scientists; Sociology; Sociology of religion; Surveys; Tradition (Religion); Tradition (Theology); Traditions; United States Of America; United States; United States > US; Religion
• ISSN: 0037-7732; 1534-7605
• DOI: 10.1093/sf/sos121

Our original article espoused a simple way to recode religious groups on the General Social Survey (GSS) into historically meaningful categories and attempted to steer social scientists away from assigning these groups to a "Liberal-Moderate-Conservative" scale (Smith 1990). Among other problems, such scales create arbitrary cutpoints, have little to do with the historical movements that gave rise to particular religious affiliations and tend to conflate religious, economic, social and political ideas into one monolithic measure. In contrast, we assigned Protestants to mainline, evangelical and Black Protestant categories. In 12short years, our classificatory system (RELTRAD) has become the standard way to code GSS affiliation data and has been utilized in many other survey efforts. Since its publication, no competing classificatory schemes have emerged to replace it. This article extends our earlier work and raises a series of theoretical and methodological issues for consideration by scholars in efforts to classify religious groups for analysis purposes.