Fewer People Are Church Regulars Than Claim to Be

Narrator: Understanding human behavior through surveys is notoriously unreliable. People can have a hard time recounting their own feelings or actions—or can intentionally or unintentionally bend the truth. One subject area that’s relied heavily on surveys is attendance at religious services, and it’s unclear how accurate the resulting body of research really is.

Devin G. Pope: Issues include things like social desirability bias. So we know that when we ask people, “Did you vote?” A lot of people say yes that actually didn’t. And it’s possible that going to church or another place of worship would have the same issue, where we ask people, “Do you attend regularly?” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I go every week.” And perhaps that might not be the case. What I wanted to do in this project is try to understand a little bit more about what religion looks like in America, just from a descriptive point of view. How many people are going to some place of worship regularly? What types of people go—and just try to understand more about what does religion look like in America.

Narrator: That’s Chicago Booth’s Devin Pope. In a recent paper, he tries to avoid the pitfalls of survey data by analyzing cell phone location data of 2.1 million people across religions. He calculates how often they attended services over a given year and compares it with published survey results to see when the two sources of information match and when they don’t.

Devin G. Pope: With these cell phones, we can look at when the cell phone enters the geofence or the coordinates, the lat-long coordinates of one of about 480,000 church buildings or church or other places of worship buildings in the United States. So this allows us to try to see what religious worship attendance looks like when we don’t just have to ask people, but when we can actually see where their phone is going.

Narrator: On any given week, Pope finds, about 45 million Americans attend a service of some kind. But there are discrepancies between what cell phones and surveys show: Cell phone data indicate that only 5 percent of people attend weekly, versus 22 percent of people who claim to do so on surveys. Similarly, 21 percent of people in Pope’s sample attended services at least monthly, compared with 30 percent of people who claimed to in surveys.

Devin G. Pope: In addition to the data just on how many people attend regularly, we can do some really interesting things with the data. So for example, we can look across different types of religions and see if these numbers vary by religions. And you see a lot of differences.

Narrator: For instance, about 85 percent of regular weekly worshippers are Protestants. And though fewer in number, Latter-Day Saints (or Mormons) and Jehovah’s Witnesses were most likely to be weekly attenders, while Catholics and Jews were less likely.

Devin G. Pope: We also look at other results. So for example, we can think about: What does the income variation look like across religions? We can use the census block, where people live, to estimate their income, and then we can say, “OK, which diverses have the most diverse congregations?”

Narrator: Pope’s final findings suggest that cell phone data might reveal connections that people might not be willing or able to identify. In his study, more frequent worshipers were less likely to visit establishments like casinos, strip clubs, and liquor stores.

Devin G. Pope: This research is very descriptive, meaning we’re just kind of trying to show: what does religious worship look like. We’re not answering a lot of questions that one might care about. For example, if one chooses to participate in a religious congregation, does that change your life in various ways? Or what are the types of things that lead people to want to be more or less religious? We’re not answering those questions in this paper. We’re more providing a descriptive analysis of what is happening. But what you find in research is often these descriptive analyses are important. Once you start to understand, well, why is it that people are worshiping the way they are and how is it that they’re doing it, then you can move on to start answering some other questions of, OK, where do we see big changes in when people decide to worship and what can we learn from that? And so my hope is that this research opens up additional avenues of understanding how religion matters to people in their lives and the impact that it could have on their lives.