Compare methods

	Congregational Network Analysis	National Congregations Study Method
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2018	1999
Originator	Sean F. Everton	Mark Chaves and colleagues
Type	Social network analysis applied to religious communities	Hypernetwork (multiplicity) sampling design for congregations
Seminal source	Everton, S. F. (2018). Networks and Religion: Ties That Bind, Loose, Build-Up and Tear Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781108404075	Chaves, M., Konieczny, M. E., Beyerlein, K., & Barman, E. (1999). The National Congregations Study: Background, Methods, and Selected Results. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 38(4), 458-476.
Aliases	Religious Network Analysis, Faith Community Network Analysis, Congregation Social Network Analysis, Networks-and-Religion Analysis	Hypernetwork Congregation Sampling, Congregation Census Methodology, NCS Hypernetwork Method, Multiplicity Sampling of Congregations
Related	3	3
Summary	Congregational network analysis applies social network analysis to religious communities, treating congregations and their members as nodes connected by ties of friendship, kinship, recruitment, and shared participation. Rather than studying individuals in isolation, it asks how the structure of relationships within and between faith communities shapes who joins, who stays, how commitment spreads, and how movements grow or fracture. Sean Everton's Networks and Religion (2018) organizes the field around the idea that ties bind people into communities, loose them from old commitments, build up movements, and tear them down, showing across recruitment, conversion, and decline that relational structure is often a better predictor of religious outcomes than individual attributes alone.	The National Congregations Study (NCS) method solves a hard sampling problem: there is no complete list of all the congregations in a country, so they cannot be sampled directly. Mark Chaves and colleagues addressed this with hypernetwork (multiplicity) sampling - drawing a representative sample of individuals, asking those who attend services to name their congregation, and treating each named congregation as a sampled unit. Because a congregation is named in proportion to the number of people who attend it, this procedure automatically yields a sample of congregations with probability proportional to size, from which leaders are then interviewed. First fielded in 1998 and described in the 1999 Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion article, and repeated in later waves summarized in Chaves and Eagle's 2015 report, the NCS has become the standard way to produce nationally representative data on American congregations.