Compare methods

	Religious Attendance Measurement	National Congregations Study Method
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1993	1999
Originator	C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler & Mark Chaves	Mark Chaves and colleagues
Type	Measurement and bias-correction for religious service attendance	Hypernetwork (multiplicity) sampling design for congregations
Seminal source	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.	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	Church Attendance Measurement, Worship Attendance Overreporting Correction, Time-Diary Attendance Measurement, Attendance Self-Report Validation	Hypernetwork Congregation Sampling, Congregation Census Methodology, NCS Hypernetwork Method, Multiplicity Sampling of Congregations
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	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.