Working with numbers

The Gallup Survey folks came out with a survey indicating what state had the most churchgoers.

The survey showed that Mississippi led the nation with 63 percent of the people saying they attended a religious service weekly or almost weekly.

The top-10 church attendance states are:

State	% attend weekly religious services
Mississippi	63
Alabama	58
South Carolina	56
Louisiana	56
Utah	56
Tennessee	54
Arkansas	53
North Carolina	53
Georgia	51
Texas	50

You will notice that most of these states are in the South.

The states that showed the fewest number of people attending regular church services come mostly from the Northeast and Northwest.

State	% attend weekly religious services
Vermont	23
New Hampshire	26
Maine	27
Massachusetts	29
Nevada	30
Hawaii	31
Oregon	31
Alaska	31
Washington	32
Rhode Island	32
Connecticut	32

Alone these numbers are interesting if you are going to do a story about regular church attendance.

But let’s look further.

Is there a relationship between education and regular church attendance. Conventional wisdom says the more educated a person is, the less likely he or she will regularly attend religious service.

Let’s compare some date.

Thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau, we can come up with a chart that provides the education level of each state.

It is easy enough to work through the Census Bureau web site (www.census.gov) to create a custom table that will give us the basic information we need to use to start the comparison.

All taken from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates

So now we can look at how education and regular religious service attendance compare.

State	Ranking of religious attendance	Percentage of college graduates compared to population	Ranking of 50 states plus DC and PR for college graduates
Mississippi	1	12	51
Alabama	2	14	46
South Carolina	3	15	38
Louisiana	4	13	48
Utah	5	16	29
Tennessee	6	15	44
Arkansas	7	12	49
North Carolina	8	17	27
Georgia	9	17	24
Texas	10	16	37
Vermont	51	23	6
New Hampshire	50	22	7
Maine	49	18	18
Massachusetts	48	25	2
Nevada	47	14	44
Hawaii	46	20	13
Oregon	45	19	15
Alaska	44	16	28
Washington	43	20	11
Rhode Island	42	20	12
Connecticut	41	23	3

A similar pattern emerges when frequency of religious attendance is compared with a state’s ranking for populations with at least a 12^th grade education but not a high school graduate.

This proves everything, right? Numbers don’t lie, do they?

It’s not so much that numbers don’t lie but they are not the whole story.

Nevada is #1 has 1.85% of its population with 12 years of schooling but no degree. It sits at number 44 among the states and territories for college graduates. And it is one of the least religious states in the survey.

Why do you think? (Hint: In what state is Las Vegas and Reno located? Another hint: What state showed the largest housing boom – and bust – in the past five years?)

The numbers get you started. And you can use them to help build the structure of your story but real work is explaining what the numbers mean and putting a human face to them.

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Oh, and it only took me about 45 minutes to look up the data on the Census Bureau web page, save the file as an Excel document and do the quick and dirty analysis. So "not having enough time" doesn't work as an excuse.