Interesting Pew Stats on JWs--Alarming Trends for the Borg

by Cadellin 21 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Cadellin

  Cognisonance: I'm not trained in even basic statistics, so I can't comment on your work, although it may be that larger samples would be more meaningful. Nevertheless, I think the real import is that these trends seem to corroborate what many of us have suspected or observed in recent years.

  Congs. seem to be filled with women and/or elderly people. And we can look at the increase of Spanish-lang. district conventions as an indicator of the growth in that demographic. Women, elderly and minorities tend to make less money than other groups. Moreover, trends in employment point to fewer and lower-paying jobs available for people with only high school educations. IOW, these Pew statistics fit with the overall picture.

  I think the GB has reason to be very alarmed--we will likely see even more fervent and frequent pleas for money but as these stats suggest, they are going after the ones who have least to give (and are often the most willing and vulnerable).
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  adjusted knowledge

  Cadeliin, this is not Cognisonance work. This is research done by Pew Research. Though I'm not a Statistician, I've take four college level Statistic courses, and they have followed acceptable guidelines. In fact they did take a large sample, therefore the information is "more meaningful".

  "The size of the national sample is unusually large for a religion survey. There are two main reasons for this. First, the large sample size makes it possible to estimate the religious composition of the U.S. with a high degree of precision. After taking into account the survey’s design effect (based on the sample design and the survey weights), the margin of error for results based on the full sample is +/- 0.6 percentage points.

  Second, the large sample size makes it possible to describe the demographic characteristics of a wide variety of religious groups, including relatively small groups that cannot be analyzed using data from smaller surveys. With more than 35,000 respondents in total, the Religious Landscape Study includes interviews with roughly 350 people in religious groups that account for just 1% of the U.S. population, and with 100 or more people in religious groups that are as small as three-tenths of 1% of the overall population. For instance, the study includes interviews with 245 Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group that accounts for less than 1% of the U.S. population and is typically represented by only a few dozen respondents in smaller surveys."
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  problemaddict 2

  There is quite a bit of data to mine, but I found one thing interesting.

  They asked "Christian" religions if they identified as evangelical or born again. JW's said no 3/4 of the time. I'm just thinking about the JW on the phones head exploding when they heard the question, thinking about what the right answer is to a fundamental part of their faith.

  Also the lack of retention reflects what it did in the 2007 survey.

  
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  konceptual99

  I am slight surprised that almost half of those that were raised as Witnesses go to another faith. I would have expected a larger number to simply keep away from religion.
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  freemindfade

  I guess this confirms the heated controversial debate of who wakes up first men or women... lol
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  konceptual99

  There is another side to that - there are a far larger number of women with UBM that men. Every congregation I know also seems to have more widows that widowers.
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  cognisonance

  I'm also no statistician but am learning more about the subject everyday. I just finished an undergraduate, junior-level Applied Statistics course.
  

  While the sample size is large for the entire study it's a bit small for JWs. They warn about this in their charts and point to this diagram. Sample size for JWs is between ~200-250 depending on the chart/table/trend:

  
  

  So if I read this right, If in 2007 40% were men, and in 2014, 35%, the "error bars" could be from 36-44 and 31-39 respectively, which overlap each other.
  
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  konceptual99

  Sorry for being a bit dumb but does that mean that the 34% of born in JWs that still identify with dubdom is +/-8%?
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  Crazyguy

  Is 50k per household still considered lower end of the middle class? Seams to me with enflation etc. that this figure would be higher now.
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  Syme

  Just an observation, if I may, guys.

  The fact that JWs are increasingly poorer, and non-white, in US, is not something to be embarrassing for the religion. It is not something to make us apostates and ex-JWs feel "good". I know that we are all happy to see less cash flowing in the Borg HQ, but let's be careful here.
  

  The problem with JWs is not their population statistics, if they're black or poor, have blond hair or red hair. The problem with JWs is their false beliefs, their inhumane behavior (when they shun and deny emergency blood transfusions), and mainly, their leadership (GB). That applies to every 'faithful' JW, regardless if he's black or white, poor or rich, football fan or basketball fan.