Compare methods

	Lived Religion Ethnography	Religious Attendance Measurement
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	1993
Originator	Meredith B. McGuire (synthesis); Robert Orsi	C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler & Mark Chaves
Type	Ethnographic fieldwork on everyday religious practice	Measurement and bias-correction for religious service attendance
Seminal source	McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780195368338	Hadaway, C. K., Marler, P. L., & Chaves, M. (1993). What the Polls Don't Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance. American Sociological Review, 58(6), 741-752.
Aliases	Everyday Religion Ethnography, Lived Religion Fieldwork, Religion-as-Practiced Ethnography, Vernacular Religion Fieldwork	Church Attendance Measurement, Worship Attendance Overreporting Correction, Time-Diary Attendance Measurement, Attendance Self-Report Validation
Related	3	3
Summary	Lived religion ethnography studies religion as people actually practice it in everyday life rather than as official doctrine, institutional membership, or survey-reported belief. Synthesized by Meredith McGuire in Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (2008) and shaped by historians such as Robert Orsi, the approach turns attention from what churches teach and what censuses count to what individuals do - the prayers, objects, rituals, healing practices, and improvised devotions that fill ordinary days and often cut across or ignore official boundaries. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, the ethnographer documents this embodied, material, and frequently idiosyncratic religion, revealing a far messier and more creative religious life than membership statistics or doctrinal statements suggest.	Religious attendance measurement addresses a deceptively simple question - how often do people actually attend religious services? - and the systematic bias that plagues the obvious answer. Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves's 1993 American Sociological Review article 'What the Polls Don't Show' demonstrated that Americans substantially overreport church attendance: when they compared the roughly 40 percent weekly attendance that polls report with actual head counts in congregations, they found real attendance was far lower, around 20 percent for Protestants and 28 percent for Catholics. The method therefore centers on validating self-reports against independent benchmarks - direct counts and, in later work, time-use diaries - and on correcting survey estimates for the overreporting that arises because attendance is socially desirable and respondents answer with an identity rather than a tally.