Re: how many Americans go to church, and why?
On Apr 7, 2007, at 10:08 AM, bitch@pulpculture.org wrote:
really? i didn’t know they were repug-symps. i don’t recall that
coming up in the nearly 10 yrs this list has been around.
It came up during the 2004 election. Gallup polls regularly showed
Bush a few points higher than other houses did, and their approval
rating for Bush has run a little higher too. I don’t think they cook
the data, but sometimes your political unconscious dictates your
methodological choices.
I’d posted something to the AAPOR list about this during the 2004
campaign, and later got a call from a guy who used to work at Gallup.
He said: “They’re all Republicans!” and he wasn’t happy about it. He
then amended this to say that many of them are. I think I posted that
report too.
the sympathy to religion was obvious. I think they tend to ask pretty decent questions,
myself. my criticism is, of course, with the limitations of survey research.
it needs to be mixed up with the scads of other kinds of research such as ethnographies and the social network studies woj mentioned.
Yup, of course. But survey research is far from worthless, and it’s
always interesting to ask people what they think, isn’t it?
Doug