@JohnYoungE From dead link:
Did You Really Go To Church This Week? Behind the Poll Data
by C. Kirk Hadaway and P.L. Marler
...This article appeared in The Christian Century, May 6, 1998, pp. 472-475.
...Church attendance in the U.S. is, apparently, stable and strong. Year after year 40 percent of Americans tell pollsters that they attended church or synagogue in the last seven days. From this evidence, American religion seems quite hardy, especially compared to the statistics from European nations. If the poll data can be believed, three decades of otherwise corrosive social and cultural change has left American church attendance virtually untouched.
...Several years ago we teamed up with sociologist Mark Chaves to test the 40 percent figure for church attendance. Our initial study, based on attendance counts in Protestant churches in one Ohio county and Catholic churches in 18 dioceses, indicated a much lower rate of religious participation than the polls report. Instead of 40 percent of Protestants attending church, we found 20 percent. Instead of 50 percent of Catholics attending church, we found 28 percent. In other words, actual church attendance was about half the rate indicated by national public opinion polls.
Gerald Marwell, then editor of American Sociological Review, said our research raised questions about "stylized facts" that are passed around "as if they were the truth." Of course, much depends on whose experience does or does not match the presumed "truth" about American church attendance.
Many people, and particularly local church pastors, did not seem surprised by our findings. In fact, a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that "plenty of religious leaders express private doubts about polls that find almost half of American adults say they worship God each week." Less congratulatory, although still confirming, were the reactions of some of our colleagues, friends and family which tended to go something like, "So you discovered what everybody else already knew," or "Well, I could have told you that church attendance wasn’t that high without doing a study about it."
...We did not begin our research with the assumption that the Gallup figures were "wrong." Like other social scientists who use survey data, we trusted Gallup poll results because we knew they employed sound sampling methods. Doubts emerged, however, when we compared statistics on church membership from American denominations to Gallup’s reports on church attendance. If the percentage of Americans attending church is stable, aggregate church membership should have increased as the American population grew. But after adding together denominational membership statistics (including estimates of membership for independent congregations) we found that the aggregate membership total has been virtually static since the late 1960s. This contradiction led us to wonder if Americans were reporting the same level of attendance to pollsters while their actual church participation was dropping. Our first study provided an initial test of this dynamic. Subsequent research confirmed it in important ways.
We returned to Ashtabula County, Ohio, to add a Roman Catholic attendance count to our previous count of Protestants. Because Catholic parishes did not regularly record attendance, we counted Catholic mass attendance ourselves by attending each scheduled mass at every Catholic parish in the county. We attended a total of 38 masses in 13 parishes over several months, counting attendance at each mass. Our counts showed that 24 percent of Catholics attended mass during an average week. In a poll of Ashtabula county residents, however, 51 percent of Roman Catholic respondents said they attended church during the past week. The gap between what people say and do in this rural county is roughly the same as that found in the original study among Catholics in 18 metropolitan dioceses.