By Robert Wuthnow
ISBN-10: 019025890X
ISBN-13: 9780190258900
This present day, a billion-dollar-a-year polling floods the media with details. Pollsters let us know not just which political applicants will win, yet how we're training our religion. what percentage americans went to church final week? Have they been born back? Is Jesus as well known as Harry Potter? Polls let us know that forty percentage of usa citizens attend non secular companies every one week. They express that African american citizens aren't any extra non secular than white americans, and that Jews are leaving behind their faith in checklist numbers. in response to best sociologist Robert Wuthnow, none of that's right. Pollsters say that attendance at non secular providers has been consistent for many years. yet in the course of that point reaction premiums in polls have plummeted, robot "push ballot" calls have proliferated, and sampling has develop into tougher. The accuracy of political polling should be recognized simply because elections truly take place. yet there aren't any election effects to teach if the percentage of people that say they pray on a daily basis or attend companies per week is true. a wide majority of the general public doubts that polls may be depended on, and but evening after evening on television, polls specialists sum up the nation's conduct to an keen viewers of millions.
Inventing American faith offers a provocative new argument in regards to the impression of polls in modern American society. Wuthnow contends that polls and surveys have shaped-and distorted-how faith is known and portrayed within the media and in addition by way of spiritual leaders, practitioners, and students. He demands a strong public dialogue approximately American faith that extends way past the data supplied by way of polls and surveys, and indicates functional steps to facilitate this type of dialogue, together with alterations in how the result of polls and surveys are offered.
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Additional resources for Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith
Sample text
Introduction 2. The Survey Movement 3. Measuring Belief 4. Scientific Studies 5. Pollsters as Pundits 6. In Polls We Trust? 7. Talking Back 8. Taking Stock Acknowledgments Notes Index Inventing American Religion 1 Introduction MIDWAY BETWEEN NEW York and Philadelphia, a large stone building known as Old Nassau stands as an icon of American history. Built in 1756 to house the College of New Jersey, it was seized by the British in 1776, fired on and retaken by Washington’s troops, and then for four months in 1783 served as the seat of American government while the Congress of the Confederation convened in its second-floor library.
Unlike Laidlaw’s study in New York, Du Bois conducted the interviews himself, personally talking with some five thousand persons. ”19 Data from the survey, supplemented with extensive observations, field research, and qualitative interviews with community leaders, formed the basis for The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, which Du Bois published in 1899. The book went well beyond reporting results of the Seventh Ward survey, tracing the history of African-American migration to Philadelphia, describing the rise of its neighborhoods and social institutions, discussing the history of discrimination and violence, charting changes in its population in comparison with other cities, and presenting census statistics on age and gender to put the Seventh Ward in perspective.
Its focus was on politics and public opinion, not on the deeply personal, complex, highly diverse beliefs and practices embodied in the many religious traditions of the nation. From the start, polling succeeded by selling brief, seemingly newsworthy results to newspapers. The results came from brief doorstep encounters in which strangers answered predesigned questions in predefined one- or two-word responses. Still, in the absence of other information and without much in the way of sustained criticism, polling gradually became a widely accepted way of thinking about religion.
Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith by Robert Wuthnow
by Donald
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