The Measure of American Religious Traditions: Theoretical and Measurement Considerations

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 pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social forces 2012-09, Vol.91 (1), p.65-73
Main Authors: Woodberry, Robert D., Park, Jerry Z., Kellstedt, Lyman A., Regnerus, Mark D., Steensland, Brian
Format: Article
Language:English
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
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Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:0037-7732
1534-7605
DOI:10.1093/sf/sos121