Compare methods

	Religious Switching Analysis	RELTRAD Affiliation Classification
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2014	2000
Originator	Darren E. Sherkat; Pew Research Center	Brian Steensland, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox & Robert D. Woodberry
Type	Transition/retention analysis of religious affiliation change	Classification/coding scheme for religious affiliation
Seminal source	Sherkat, D. E. (2014). Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans' Shifting Religious Identities. New York: New York University Press. ISBN: 9780814741276	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	Religious Mobility Analysis, Religious Retention Analysis, Denominational Switching Analysis, Faith Transition-Matrix Modeling	Religious Tradition Coding, RELTRAD Scheme, Denominational Classification Scheme, Religious Affiliation Coding
Related	3	3
Summary	Religious switching analysis studies how people move between religious traditions over their lives by comparing the religion they were raised in with the one they hold as adults. Its central tool is the origin-by-destination transition matrix, whose rows are childhood traditions and whose entries give the probability of ending up in each adult tradition; the diagonal gives retention, the off-diagonals give defection and recruitment, and summing across rows yields each group's net gains and losses. Darren Sherkat's Changing Faith (2014) used large national datasets to map the dynamics and consequences of Americans' shifting identities, and the Pew Research Center's 2015 religious-switching findings quantified how Catholicism and mainline Protestantism lose members while the religiously unaffiliated gain - making switching a primary engine of change in the American religious landscape.	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.