Parade Magazine Poll on Spirituality

Link.

6 comments:

Baconsbud said...

I took the poll and the responses to several of the questions seem to not really fit when you considered them with how other questions were answered.

Anonymous said...

I'd like to see how this type of poll would come out in Wired Magazine (for example).

Food for thought, but not to attack the value of the poll, only to give my perspective.

- Is it a representative sample of the population?
- Does every type of person in the population read Parade?
- Does every type of person in the population have access to Parades On Line poll?
- Are the questions consistent with each other?
- Are any of the questions "leading" meaning constructed to elicit a response more likely than another?

Anonymous said...

I had linked to the poll itself so I just changed the link to the article which explains itself.

Chris Jones said...

Same experience as Baconsbud. Toward the midpoint of the poll, the questions began to presume a religious viewpoint and had no option for "this question isn't applicable to me".

Luke said...

It was an online poll. I'd like to know more about the methodology, but just from that I wouldn't trust it much.

goprairie said...

I think the poll reveals how goofy people are about religion now. A huge percent think it is a 'source of truth' yet they are mostly not actively involved in a church, so presumably not actively studying it or reading about it or THINKING about it. So what can that 'truth' be? Their religion is based on what they were taught as a child or a teen and been distilled into a thin set of stereotypes and impessions since then. They can't subscribe to a particular belief system because they have no idea what the systems out there are or even what THEY believe really. If you asked most of them to write down statements about what they believe and then ask a few questions, they will make contradictory statements and really, have little 'knowledge' of what they believe or why. A faith system this flimsy cannot be passed on to kids very well, can it, so can we expect a further erosion of faith? Will kids put some thought into this or continue to subscribe to the flimsy tissue of stereotypes that people call religion?