The question asks about two issues simultaneously. The problems of double-barreled questions can be illustrated with the following example, “How strongly do you identify as being a Christian and a terrorist?” The respondent may very well be both a Christian and a terrorist, but, in all likelihood, they are probably only one or the other. Related to this, the question also falls afoul of warnings against double-barreled questions, or questions that ask about two separate and distinct issues simultaneously these are strongly discouraged by principles of good survey design ( Converse, 1986), as respondents may not be able to accurately address both elements of the question with a single response. As prior research has shown, some atheists report religious affiliations ( Sherkat, 2008) and not all nonreligious people are atheists ( Kosmin et al., 2009 Lee, 2014).
By asking about both belonging and belief in this question, the question conflates two dimensions of religiosity. Belief in a god or higher power can be and often is correlated with religious affiliation but it is not a religious affiliation ( Cragun, 2016). Religious affiliation (i.e., ‘belonging’) has to do with an individual’s sense of connectedness or alignment with a religious tradition ( Day, 2011). First, the researchers fail to realize that there is a difference between ‘believing’ and ‘belonging’. There are numerous problems with this question. Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not would you say you are: (a) a religious person, (b) not a religious person, (c) a convinced atheist, (d) do not know/no response. This measure has been used by WIN/Gallup International ( 2012) for decades and is also the primary measure of religiosity used in the World Values Survey ( “WVS” 2014). There is a widely-used measure of religiosity that is extremely problematic. In this research note, I will examine some better and worse ways to measure religiosity in light of the idea that such measures should also indicate something about an individual’s nonreligiosity or secularity as well.Īn instructive way to think about better questions about nonreligious identity is to examine worse questions. Instead, most large-scale surveys include at most a few questions about religiosity (and, to date, virtually no explicit questions about how people are secular). While we have some ways to measure how religious or nonreligious someone, the use of lengthy scale measures in large, nationally-representative surveys is rare, likely because of the cost. The answer to the question, “How are people secular or nonreligious?” is still an ongoing concern. Additionally, while there have now been some efforts to measure the dimensions of secularity ( Schnell, 2015), it’s not entirely clear whether the same dimensions of religiosity (i.e., belief, behavior, and belonging) apply to the nonreligious ( Lee, 2014). To what extent the problems in measuring nonreligion are intentional or unintentional biases of pro-religious researchers is unclear ( Cragun and Hammer, 2011). This is particularly problematic when researchers try to make comparisons between religious and nonreligious individuals as they may not actually be capturing whether or not someone is nonreligious or if they are affirmatively secular ( Galen, 2012 Baker and Smith, 2015).
Many measures of religiosity capture only how religious people are, ranging from very high levels of religiosity (presumably along the three dimensions just noted) to very low levels of religiosity. We now know that measures of religiosity are typically not also measures of nonreligiosity or secularity ( Hall, Meador and Koenig, 2008 Hall, Koenig and Meador, 2009 Hwang, Hammer and Cragun, 2011). While those measures are varied, there seems to be growing agreement among scholars that there are least three core dimensions of religiosity that should be captured when trying to get a comprehensive measure of how religious someone is: belief, behavior, and belonging ( Keysar, 2014). Various measures of religiosity continue to be used, depending on the context and group of interest ( Cragun, Hammer and Nielsen, 2015). Since then, there have been numerous measures developed to try to capture individual religiosity, some with just a few dimensions, others with as many as eight dimensions ( Hill and Hood, 1999). Social scientists have known that religiosity is multidimensional since the 1960s ( Glock and Stark, 1966).
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