LibGuides: Finding Data & Statistics: People: Religion

Religion Statistics

Association of Religion Data Archives

CIA World Factbook
Percentage of population for major denominations by country. Current year only.

Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life
Pew Specialized Religion Datasets
General Social Survey
General Social Survey (GSS) is a long running survey of social, cultural and political indicators. In addition to the GSS, topic modules include computer and Internet, racial and ethnic prejudice, and child mental-health stigma. The GSS has participated since 1985 in the International Social Survey Program.
NationMaster.com
Select Religion as a category, then subcategory by denomination.
Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) Project
Variables include year and country, name of group, raw popular data, population estimate, and Correlates of War Code.
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The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project is a large-scale effort initiated by the Cline Center as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. Its objective is to fill an important void in the field of comparative politics by creating a set of time-varying measures that gauge the nature and depth of country-specific socio-cultural cleavages. It focuses on 165 of the largest countries in the world (all countries with a population above 500,000 in 2004) during the post-WWII era. The data-gathering phase has two main components. The first deals with the collection of population data for the principal ethnic and religious groups in a country; it uses these data to create a set of country-specific projections on the relative sizes of the different groups during the postwar era. The second component involves collecting survey data from country and regional experts on: (1) various physical, cultural and ascribed differences between the groups; and (2) country-specific factors that ameliorate/ aggravate inter-group differences (e.g., crosscutting organizational memberships; dyadic relationships within social, economic, legal and political domains that reflect power differentials). The following paper provides details on each component.

Religion Datasets

American National Election Studies (ANES)
Survey of voting behavior in the United States, conducted biennially since 1956. Basic questions on religious identification and attendance at religious services have been asked throughout the time series but the religion module was substantially widened and improved starting in 1990, making possible richer analyses of how religion affects political attitudes and behavior. Contains links to download all the data.

American Religion Data Archive (ARDA)
The American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) holds over 200 surveys on religion, including general population surveys, surveys of selected religious groups, surveys of religious professionals, and aggregate church, congregational and denominational data.
Arts and Religion Survey 1999
This data set offers information on Americans' opinions about the role of the arts relative to religion.
General Social Survey
General Social Survey (GSS) is a long running survey of social, cultural and political indicators. In addition to the GSS, topic modules include computer and Internet, racial and ethnic prejudice, and child mental-health stigma. The GSS has participated since 1985 in the International Social Survey Program.
International Social Survey Program
A crossnational collaborative program that develops topical modules dealing with important areas of social science as supplements to regular national surveys in more than 20 countries. Topics have included religion, family and gender roles, role of the government, social inequality, the environment, and work attitudes.
National Congregations Study 1998 and 2006 @ ICPSR
A nationally representative study of congregations carried out via interviews with congregational informants, mostly clergy. Conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). Respondents reported on a wide variety of congregational activities. A sample size of 1236.
National Studies of Youth and Religion
The National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) is a nationally representative telephone survey of English and Spanish-speaking teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 (in 2003), and their parents.
National Survey of Black Americans @ ICPSR
National Survey of Black Americans 1979-1980, 1987-1988, 1988-1989, 1992 (ICPSR)
The survey investigates neighborhood-community integration, services, crime and community contact, the role of religion and the church, physical and mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction, employment, the effects of chronic unemployment, the effects of race on the job, interaction with family and friends, racial attitudes, race identity, group stereotypes, and race ideology.
The Berman Jewish DataBank
This is a repository for demographic and other quantitative social scientific surveys about Jews in the United States, Canada, and the world. It archives the National Jewish Population Surveys as well as a number of community surveys, and includes American Jewish Yearbook back to 1899.

World Values Surveys Series
The series is designed to enable a crossnational comparison of values and norms on a wide variety of topics and to monitor changes in values and attitudes across the globe. A variety of questions on religion and morality were included. Data is currently available for 1981-1984, 1990-1993, 1995-1997, and 1999-2002.