Cellphone activity clarifies actual church attendance levels

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This article was published 29/06/2024 (465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to surveys in the U.S., somewhere between 22 per cent to 30 per cent of Americans say they attend religious services weekly, depending on what polling organization is providing the results. But is that really true?

After all, it’s widely known that people often over-represent how frequently they attend religious services. This is known in sociology circles as “social desirability bias,” or more colloquially as the “halo effect.” That’s when people misrepresent the truth in order to match what they believe they should be doing or in order to be perceived in a more positive light by others — in this case, attending religious services more often than they actually do.

Finding out the truth about attendance at religious services in the U.S. was the goal for Devon Pope, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. But short of following everyone to religious services each week to see if they are really there — an impossibility — how could he do it?

The answer was simple: cellphones.

As we know, our online activity is tracked by Google and various social media platforms so that information can be sold to advertisers. The same thing happens with cellphones. In that case, tracking software is used to let businesses know how many people come into a store each day, how long they stay, what aisles they spend the most time in and how often they visit. The information that is collected helps businesses understand the shopping patterns and preferences of their customers.

Since almost everyone carries a cellphone with them these days — 97 per cent of Americans have one now, according to Pew Research — Pope decided to use the same technology to track attendance at religious services. His goal was to discover if what people reported about their attendance measured up to real-life experience.

To conduct his research, he used geolocation data from Veraset, a company that provides geospatial data for millions of U.S. cellphones. His survey took place between April 2019 and February 2020.

And what did he find? In a working paper titled Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data, Pope found that only about five per cent of Americans are actually at a religious service on their primary day of worship — far fewer than those who tell survey takers they are there.

Along with showing how many people actually attend religious services weekly, Pope also found that fewer attended monthly; only 21 per cent of Americans attend that often according to cellphone tracking, compared to the 30 per cent who say that’s their pattern.

Pope also found that the frequency of religious attendance varies significantly by religion. Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses had a relatively high number of members who attended weekly, while Catholics and Jews had a relatively low number of weekly attendees.

Pope also factored in the weather to see if that affected attendance. It did. He found temperature and precipitation are strong and significant predictors of religious worship attendance: The colder and snowier it is, the less people attend.

He acknowledged that cellphone data tracking has limitations; some people might not have one, and a few people might turn them off when worshipping (the only way to avoid being tracked). And some groups, like Orthodox Jews, don’t use any communication devices on Sabbath.

As well, some groups meet on days other than Sunday. By factoring that in, Pope suggested that perhaps as many as nine per cent of Americans might be in worship services weekly — still far fewer than who say they are.

What about those who go to worship services but leave their phones at home? Pope ran a survey to see how many people took their phones to church, mosque, synagogue or other place of worship; 87 per cent said they did, leading him to conclude the findings are robust.

Overall, Pope said, cellphone tracking “does a reasonable job of predicting actual attendance measures.”

What would Pope’s findings look like for Canada? In 2020, according to an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada survey, 11 per cent of Canadians, or over 4.2 million people, said they attended religious services weekly. (That figure may be lower after the pandemic.) If Pope’s findings apply here, that would suggest about half that number are actually attending worship services.

Of course, we won’t know for sure about attendance in Canada unless a researcher replicates Pope’s work here. With Statistics Canada reporting that 84 per cent of Canadians had cellphones in 2020 that might not be hard to do.

You can read Pope’s full study at http://wfp.to/yNe

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