National Congregations Study Method
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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. · DOI 10.2307/1387606
- Chaves, M., & Eagle, A. (2015). Religious Congregations in 21st Century America. Durham, NC: Department of Sociology, Duke University (National Congregations Study). · URL
Curated claims
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Related methods
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