Survey of Church Membership, 1971 (ICPSR 7520)

Published: Feb 16, 1992

Principal Investigator(s):
National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07520.v1

Version V1

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Project Description

Summary

This data collection contains information by region, state, and county on churches and church membership for 53 Christian denominations in the United States in 1971. These estimates or enumerations by denomination were collected by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCCC) from each reporting denomination. The data are recorded for the nation as a whole, regions, states, SMSAs, and counties. This dataset was obtained from the Office of Research, Evaluation and Planning of the NCCC. In addition to data identifying the units of record, data for each reporting denomination are present, including: (1) number of churches, (2) number of communicant, confirmed, or full members, and (3) total number of "adherents." When incomplete information was supplied about a denomination's total number of adherents, an estimate was made by NCCC and identified in the data as such.

Citation

National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Survey of Church Membership, 1971. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1992-02-16. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07520.v1

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Funding

Aid Association for Lutherans

Subject Terms

Christianity church membership counties Metropolitan Statistical Areas Protestantism religion religious behavior religious congregations states (USA)

Geographic Coverage

North Carolina Indiana Wyoming Utah Arizona Montana Kentucky California Kansas Florida Delaware Pennsylvania Mississippi Iowa Illinois Texas Connecticut Georgia Virginia Maryland Idaho Vermont Oregon United States Oklahoma Maine Tennessee Alabama Arkansas South Carolina Washington Nebraska West Virginia Massachusetts Colorado Missouri Alaska North Dakota Wisconsin Nevada New York Rhode Island District of Columbia South Dakota Hawaii Minnesota New Jersey Michigan New Mexico New Hampshire Louisiana Ohio

Scope of Project

Time Period(s)

1971

Date of Collection

1973-01-10 -- 1973-12-31

Data Collection Notes

When a denomination supplied only a count of its communicant, confirmed, or full members, NCCC estimated the total adherents by means of a computer-based procedure. The total population of an area (as reported in the First Count 1970 Census tabulations) was divided by the total population 14 years of age and over. The resulting figure was multiplied by the number of confirmed members reported for the denomination to produce the estimated total number of adherents. When such a procedure for estimating adherents was employed, the "estimate indicator" variable for that denomination contains the value of "1".

Methodology

Universe

All of the denominations listed in the YEARBOOK OF AMERICAN CHURCHES, 1971.

Data Source

mailback questionnaires

Data Type(s)

survey data, and census/enumeration data

Version(s)

Original Release Date

1984-03-18

Version Date

1992-02-16

Version History

1984-03-18 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.
Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.

Notes

Data in this collection are available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.
The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented.

This study is provided by ICPSR. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.