Dear Colleague,

 

Our next Social Statistics Seminar will be held from 4pm (GMT) on 9 March. Dingeman Wiertz from University College London will present his work on the changes in religious polarisation in the US over the past decades.

 

Please find the details of the talk as well as the registration link below.

 

Do not hesitate to get in touch with me in case you had any questions about the seminar.

 

Best wishes,

András

 

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Dr András Vörös

Lecturer in Social Statistics

University of Manchester

Department of Social Statistics and

Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis

HBS G20, Bridgeford Street, Manchester, M15 6FH, UK

 

 

 

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

Please register using your full name and your email address.

 

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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We provide two options for getting regular updates about our seminars:

1) visit the Events webpage of our department, where we will post abstracts and registration links before the talks,

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For any queries regarding the events, please contact András Vörös ([log in to unmask]).