Measuring Religion: Two Methods Compared

Abstract

Anyone who attempts to do any extensive research in the area of religion sooner or later runs up against the problem of measuring religion and the many difficulties involved therein. Even such an apparently simple project as counting the members of different religious groups poses difficult problems, centered in part around the question as to just what is a "member." Efforts to measure religious behavior of one type or another run into complex problems. Paying attention to church attendance figures, for instance, raises questions as to whether church attendance of different individuals and/or groups means the same thing. Certainly there are any number of different reasons for attending church, ranging from some which could be defined as basically religious in nature to those basically secular in nature.