Religious Attendance Measurement

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.