tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post3812367456227674137..comments2024-03-28T21:59:14.517-07:00Comments on Probably Overthinking It: Freshman hordes even more godless!Allen Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01633071333405221858noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-74260461718239898812012-05-07T07:50:03.846-07:002012-05-07T07:50:03.846-07:00Lots of good questions here. I just wrote an upda...Lots of good questions here. I just wrote an update (http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2012/05/are-religious-colleges-getting-more.html) to answer some of them.<br /><br />Thanks!Allen Downeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01633071333405221858noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-36502153038436288452012-05-03T19:50:35.591-07:002012-05-03T19:50:35.591-07:00A potentially interesting trend to look at is the ...A potentially interesting trend to look at is the religious participation of students attending Catholic or other religious institutions. I wonder if the trend is toward religious students (those who report both religious affiliation and participation in students) being more likely to go to religiously-affiliated colleges. This would mean a reduction of religious students at state/non-sectarian schools and an increase in the religiosity of students at affiliated schools (this might even be skewed because the survey doesn't include some of the most religious schools such as Liberty University). This would be a reflection of the increasing polarization of our society. <br /><br />On another subject, I tend to distrust steadily increasing social trends. From a complexity theory perspective, I would expect more of a cycle in religious (dis-)belief, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a crash in the number of non-believers sometime in the near future, although predicting exactly when that will happen is virtually impossible with the relatively small amount of data available (40 years is not enough).Brenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13314564465951923607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-51912615471236660332012-02-09T02:14:56.261-08:002012-02-09T02:14:56.261-08:00Another factor they could maybe take into consider...Another factor they could maybe take into consideration is IQ. Atheists are more likely to have higher IQs which could influence their desire to continue their education.Syn Hollidayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02626797108729883621noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-77270478697855542192012-01-30T04:43:47.161-08:002012-01-30T04:43:47.161-08:00You are right, my apologies. I screwed up the tab...You are right, my apologies. I screwed up the tabulations and was getting the wrong percentages.joshtk76https://www.blogger.com/profile/16438773581511113376noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-10294726620142617922012-01-29T19:14:11.346-08:002012-01-29T19:14:11.346-08:00It looks to me like the results are very similar. ...It looks to me like the results are very similar. I plotted RELIG vs YEAR for AGE(18-22). The fraction of respondents who answered NONE hovered near 10% in the 70s, with a low of 7.8% in 1975. Since 2000 it has been near 22%, with a high of 30% in 2002. That seems entirely consistent with what I saw in the CIRP survey.<br /><br />The GSS results are a little noisier, probably because the GSS has only 3579 respondents in this age group, compared to more than 200,000 in the CIRP survey.<br /><br />Anyway, thanks for the pointer to the GSS. That's another great source of data. It includes a much richer set of questions about religion, so maybe I will take a closer look.Allen Downeyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01633071333405221858noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894866515532737257.post-14919863143110246602012-01-29T17:58:27.095-08:002012-01-29T17:58:27.095-08:00I am a little skeptical of these results from the ...I am a little skeptical of these results from the American Freshman. American Freshman is not a random sample of the target group. <br /><br /><br />If you look at the General Social Survey, a random sample of American adults living in households, you see some increase in the "no religion" and "never attended" categories for young people ages 18-22, but it is much, much more modest than the trend shown here. <br /><br />The obvious rejoinder is that the GSS sample frame does not include kids living in dorms. So if you restrict the sample to slightly older individuals (ages 23-27) who have some kind of post-high school education, you again see some modest increase in these non-religious/non-attending categories, but they are no where near as dramatic as seen in the American Freshman.<br /><br />You can easily see this for yourself by going to the Survey Data Archive http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 which allows you to do simple descriptive analyses of GSS data from 1972-2010.joshtk76https://www.blogger.com/profile/16438773581511113376noreply@blogger.com