Compare methods

	Religious Switching Analysis	Religious Economies Analysis
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2014	1987
Originator	Darren E. Sherkat; Pew Research Center	Rodney Stark & William Sims Bainbridge; Roger Finke
Type	Transition/retention analysis of religious affiliation change	Supply-side economic analysis of religious markets
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	Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1987). A Theory of Religion. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN: 9780820403564
Aliases	Religious Mobility Analysis, Religious Retention Analysis, Denominational Switching Analysis, Faith Transition-Matrix Modeling	Religious Market Model, Supply-Side Theory of Religion, Religious Economy Model, Rational-Choice Theory of Religion
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 economies analysis treats a society's religious life as a market in which competing firms (denominations, sects, and movements) offer products to consumers (potential adherents) under varying degrees of state regulation. Developed by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge in A Theory of Religion (1987) and elaborated by Stark and Finke in Acts of Faith (2000), the framework inverts the older secularization assumption that modernity erodes religious demand. Instead it holds that latent demand for religion is relatively stable, and that observed variation in religiousness across societies is driven mainly by the supply side: how many religious firms compete, how specialized and energetic they are, and how heavily the state regulates the market. Where competition is open and unregulated, vigorous firms mobilize participation; where one firm enjoys a state-protected monopoly, it grows lazy and overall participation falls.