Compare methods

	National Congregations Study Method	RELTRAD Affiliation Classification
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1999	2000
Originator	Mark Chaves and colleagues	Brian Steensland, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox & Robert D. Woodberry
Type	Hypernetwork (multiplicity) sampling design for congregations	Classification/coding scheme for religious affiliation
Seminal source	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.	Steensland, B., Park, J. Z., Regnerus, M. D., Robinson, L. D., Wilcox, W. B., & Woodberry, R. D. (2000). The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art. Social Forces, 79(1), 291-318.
Aliases	Hypernetwork Congregation Sampling, Congregation Census Methodology, NCS Hypernetwork Method, Multiplicity Sampling of Congregations	Religious Tradition Coding, RELTRAD Scheme, Denominational Classification Scheme, Religious Affiliation Coding
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Religious affiliation classification is the task of turning hundreds of detailed denominational responses on a survey into a small, analytically useful set of religious traditions. The dominant scheme, RELTRAD, was proposed by Brian Steensland and colleagues in their 2000 Social Forces article 'The Measure of American Religion,' which criticized earlier classifications as historically and theologically incoherent and offered seven categories grounded in the development of American religious traditions: evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, other faiths, and no religion. By sorting respondents into traditions that share a meaningful religious heritage rather than into ad hoc groupings, RELTRAD became the standard variable through which sociologists relate religion to politics, family, and social attitudes.