Comments on: America’s Religious Gap?

By: Analiese Is Reading… | Quiche Moraine

Analiese Is Reading… | Quiche Moraine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:33:10 +0000

[...] Sociological Images [...]

By: Penny

Penny — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:45:03 +0000

Wow, yeah, the dot plot is far more informative. I suspected as much. I also liked Sides’s comments about the choice of darker shades for more-religious, and lighter shades for less-religious.

By: chuk

chuk — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:10:38 +0000

Thanks John :)

By: Jay Livingston

Jay Livingston — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:06:10 +0000

Re: the comments by Penny and Chuck. Two weeks ago, John Sides at The Monkey Cage did a re-mapping and a graph that give a much more accurate picture.
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/02/mapping_religiosity_in_the_sta.html

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:17:27 +0000

In tomorrow’s news: Water is wet.

By: abc

abc — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:42:38 +0000

Interesting to contrast this with the map of red vs. blue states. I’m surprised about Alaska, for instance. And a bit shocked at myself for being surprised — I hadn’t realised the extent to which I’d bought into the grouping of being a religious American and being a conservative one.

By: yikes

yikes — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:20:48 +0000

Hooray! According to this, I moved from one of the most religious states (SC) to one of the least (OR). Man, I knew my quality of life had improved, but I didn’t realize how much.

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:31:25 +0000

As the gay that is the map of places I’d least like to live. The darker the green the less I want to be there.

By: john

john — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:55:19 +0000

More more precise data can be found at Gallup. A link has now been added to the original post.

By: chuk

chuk — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:52:18 +0000

Moreover, each colour seriously needs to be labeled with what proportion it indicates. There could be only two points separating the most and least religious states, and you could still generate this map. We know from the article that the max is 85% religious and the least is 42%, but that’s not telling us much.

By: Penny

Penny — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:34:50 +0000

Not a great map–it looks like they just broke up the list of states into five equal categories–so the colors give you a sense of which quintile each state is in, but no information at all beyond that. I suspect within quintiles there’s still some significant variation–but that’s lost here. The Southern block might not look so solid if the data were represented with more subtlety.