Religion_3SPR – Religious Similarity and Dissimilarity between Respondent and Spouse or Partner

Note to the Instructor: This is the third in a series of three exercises that focus on religious similarity and dissimilarity between respondents and their spouses and partners.  In this exercise we'll look to see whether similarity and dissimilarity varies by sex and age.   In these exercises we're going to analyze data from the Pew 2014 Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.  We're going to use SPSS to analyze the data.  A weight variable is automatically applied to the data set so it better represents the population from which the sample was selected.  You have permission to use this exercise and to revise it to fit your needs.  Please send a copy of any revision to the author so I can see how people are using the exercises. Please contact the author for additional information.

Goal of Exercise

The goal of this exercise is to explore similarity and dissimilarity between respondents and their spouses and partners in terms of religious preference.  We'll look to see whether similarity varies by sex.

Part I – The Data Set We'll be Using

The Pew Research Center has conducted a number of surveys that deal with religion.  Two of these surveys are the Religious Landscape Surveys conducted in 2007 and then repeated in 2014.  They were very large telephone surveys of about 35,000 adults in the United States.   For more information about the surveys, go to their website

We'll be using a subset of the 2014 survey in this exercise which I have named Pew_2014_Religious_Landscape_ Survey_subset_for_classes.sav.  For the purposes of these exercises I selected a subset of variables from the complete data set.  I recoded some of the variables, created a few new variables, and renamed the variables to make them easier for students to use.  There is a weight variable which should always be used so that the sample will better represent the population from which the sample was selected.  To open the data set in SPSS, just double click on the file name.[1]  Your instructor will tell you where the file is located.

Some of you have used SPSS, the statistical package we're using, and know how to get a frequency distribution.  Others of you are new to SPSS.  There is a tutorial that you can use to learn how to get a frequency distribution.  The tutorial is freely available on the Social Science Research and Instructional Center's website.  Chapter 1 of the tutorial gives you a basic overview of SPSS and crosstabulations are covered in Chapter 5. 

Part II – Developing a Measure of Religious Similarity and Dissimilarity

In the previous exercise (Religion_2SPR) we looked at the relationship between the respondent's religious preference and that of their spouse or partner and developed a measure of religious similarity and dissimilarity.  To do that we ran a crosstab of respondent's religious preference (R5) and spouse's or partner's preference (RS3).  Let's run that crosstab now.  Put R5 in the columns and RS3 in the rows.  Don't ask for percents this time.  You'll get the observed frequencies by default and that's all that you will need.  Your output should look like Figure 1.  This is a large table so we're just showing the top left part of the table.

Title: Figure 1 - Description: This is the SPSS output for the crosstab of R5 and RS3.  Only the frequencies have been requested because you won't need the percents for this part of the exercise.

Figure 1

The upper-left cell represents the respondents who are Evangelical Protestant and whose spouse or partner are also Evangelical Protestant.  In other words, they have the same religious preference as their spouse or partner.  There are 3,990 of them.  Moving over one column to the right we have the Mainline Protestants.  Look for the number (1,830) of Mainline Protestants whose spouse or partner is also Mainline Protestant.  Do this for each religious group in the table.  Fill in the appropriate number of cases in Table 1 for all religious groups. 

Now add up all these numbers.  That is the number of respondents whose spouse or partner has the same religious preference.  The last thing to do is to divide the number of respondents who are religiously similar to their spouse or partner by the total number of cases in the table and convert that to a percent.  To get the percent that were religiously dissimilar, just subtract that value from 100.

Title: Figure 2 - Description: For each religious group, the number of respondents that have the same religious preference as their spouse or partner.

Figure 2

Part III – Comparing Religious Mobility for Men and Women

Now that we have a measure of religious similarity for our sample of adults, let's compare similarity for men and women.  That means that you will need to run a three-variable table that controls for sex.  Put R5 in the column and RS3 in the row as you did in Part 2.  Put your control variable (D14) in the big box just below the column box.  Copy by hand the frequencies into the tables on the next page.

Title: Figure 2 - Description: For each religious group, the number of male respondents that have the same religious preference as their spouse or partner.

Figure 3

Title: Figure 4 - Description: For each religious group, the number of female respondents that have the same religious preference as their spouse or partner.

Figure 4

Write a paragraph comparing religious similarity for men and for women.  Was there more similarity for men or for women?  Were they only slightly different or quite different? 
 

Part IV – Conclusions

Write one or two paragraphs summarizing what you learned about religious similarity and dissimilarity for respondents and their spouses and partners. 

 


 

[1] This assumes that the proper associations have been set up on your computer so the computer knows that .sav files are SPSS data files