Who are Jewish Americans / American Jews?

[gimbeljeremy]

This morning, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (pewforum.org) released its "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" for 2008. While AP's insights to the study focused mostly on bigger issues (their headline for the story is "Many in U.S. Drop Their Childhood Religion - Survey: Nearly Half of U.S. Adults Left Faith They Grew Up With," without

Comments

[carletongrit]

Interesting stuff. Thanks for putting in the summarizing effort so I don't have to.

[interfaithfam]

Excellent summary! Unfortunately I did speed-read the study already, but I think I like your summary the best of anything I've seen on the web about it so far.

I do wonder about the class data--how much is it skewed by random direct dialing? Are we missing a whole population of people who are cell phone only?

Of course, having just started a new job at interfaithfamily.com, I was most interested in the intermarriage data. I saw, as you did, that the study emphasizes that Jew inmarry at a higher rate than the majority of the population. I was surprised that Jews intermarry at a higher rate than Catholics do. You could see from the statistics they cited that Jews are more likely to enter interfaith marriages with Catholics than with any other religious group. Catholics are more likely to intermarry with Protestants.

Anyway, yes, nice work--very glad that Google Alerts brought me here.

[gimbeljeremy]

The survey methodology is detailed at the end of the full version (pg. 113).
It does appear that almost all interviews were from random phone dialing, so you are correct that it may not be a completely accurate census of the true population. Yet, that's the purpose of surveys.
They also used a 95% confidence interval and a .6% margin of error, meaning that if this survey was done 100 times, the results would accurately represent the entire potential population 95 out of 100 times the survey was done. That said, not all surveys will always be 100% accurate, but this study does provide very good insights into American religious affiliation.

[interfaithfam]

Yes, I did read the section on how they'd conducted the survey, and I immediately thought of an NPR article I'd heard on how polling for the presidential primaries might be flawed because of this issue with people who only use cell phones.

What's your background on surveys and statistics? (It's bound to be more fullsome than mine!)

[gimbeljeremy]

I'm a political science major at UC Davis