Retention

Last updated on: March 20, 2012 at 10:25 pm by clark

Retention 2012-03-20T22:25:37-05:00 clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I’ll put up my next post on Mormon ways of knowing shortly. In the meantime I just wanted to touch upon some things I’ve written at my blog on LDS retention. I’ll not go over my main analysis again. (You can read it at my blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) What I wanted to go into is just how hard it is to figure out how well the Church actually is doing in terms of retention. I will only deal with the Church population in the US. If knowing what is going on here is hard, knowing what is going on in the international Church is probably a lost cause.

First it seems like most of what I’ve read comes from just a few studies. The best and most informative is the ARIS self-identification study which has statistics for 1990, 2001 and 2008. They have a separate report with the information on Mormons broken out and analyzed. (They also have a report on the rise of the Nones – which is probably as important since half of those leaving Mormonism appear to join the Nones) What’s best about the ARIS study isn’t just the three periods allowing us to identify changes but the relative size of the samples. The 1990 survey interviews 1742 self-identified Mormons our of 113,723 people total. The 2008 survey had 783 Mormons out of 54,461 people. That isn’t quite as good (more than half as few) but still enough to give some reliability to the study – especially considering the overall survey size.

The next most mentioned are the various Pew studies. I’ve been pretty critical of the recently released study. I just find some of the figures pretty hard to accept on their face which I think undermines the entire study. Pew also did a study in 2007 (released in 2008) which found a self-identified Mormon population nearly 2% of the population versus ARIS’ which found a 1.4% rate. That’s a pretty big difference. The sample of size of Mormons was also much smaller at 580 people. That’s getting down to the level where issues can start to pop up. (Of course I’m from the hard sciences – but I really do understand it’s harder to get data in sociology) Yes you get a margin of error of only about ±4.1% at 95% confidence or 5.3% at 99% but errors of other sorts can start to crop in due to the lack of diversity in the population. (Admittedly the 2008 ARIS is only a bit better at 783 but a different sort of questions are asked there where I’m not sure the diversity matters as much) An other problem with the recent (2012) Pew study is that my understanding is that the same people who had been contacted in 2007 were recontacted for the just released study in order to save money. (Presumably some people couldn’t be contacted and so the sample size is even smaller)

A source I’ve seen quoted (such as by Joanna Brooks) are some studies by Phillips and Cragun. However a lot of their data – especially for the period before the ARIS data – comes from the GSS. The problem is that the total number of Mormons across the GSS is only about 500 and for most types of questions you might ask it is much lower. I tried to replicate the retention figures quoted by them and wasn’t able to using the gss. (You can try yourself if you like – the data is easy to work with online) Anything I came up with had a sample size so small as to really be largely worthless. So you can use this data but I’d be really, really careful comparing it with other data to discern a trend. It’s just problematic.

The official Mormon numbers can be helpful at guessing at trends. However they don’t tend to publicly break out US vs. International numbers that I’ve been able to find. What we do find though is the start of a significant drop in convert baptisms in the 90’s that has continued to increase. Probably the best source of analysis of this information is Cumorah.com. They have the official growth rate declining from 4-5% through much of the later half of the 20th century to less than 3% in the new century. The number of baptisms per missionary has dropped in half.

I should also note the book American Grace goes through a lot of data. Unfortunately they don’t give their raw data. Much of what they mention comes from the above along with a few other surveys and polls such as Gallup. If you haven’t read the book it really is worth checking out.

I’ll not bore you with all my analysis of retention. The most interesting thing to me is that despite a lot of hue and cry about retention numbers the evidence seems to suggest that Mormons have among the best retention of most Churches. Around 70% of those born in the Church remain in the Church. That might be shockingly low to some but I think if you take a step back and think about it that it is actually quite good.

The second thing I discovered is that the growth of the Church in the US in terms of self-identification has actually increased. To quote from my blog. “The US population grew at 15.6% from 1990 – 2001 while [self-identified] Mormons grew at 7.7% during the same period. However from 2001 – 2008 the US population grew at 8.9% while the Mormon population grew at 15%.”

What’s remarkable are the implications of this for retention. Convert baptisms are down significantly yet our growth in self-identification actually increased fairly significantly. That suggests, even acknowledging the error rate, that our retention is getting better and not worse. Still it’s been four years since that study and a lot can happen in that time. One big change is the candidacy of Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 which has brought a lot of media scrutiny of the Church. Has that affected retention? Thus far we just don’t have data to tell.

Studying Religion

Previous Post

March 13, 2012

The Trouble with BYU’s Religious Education (Part II)

Next Post

March 26, 2012 The Trouble with BYU’s Religious Education (Part III)

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 2013 Scriptures Administrative Apologetics Atonement Bible Book of Mormon Book Review BYU Doctrine Extra-Biblical Literature Family Feminism Guests History LDS Church History Leadership Marginalia Metaphysics Mormon Culture Mormon Studies Personal Issues Political Philosophy Politics Scripture Sexuality Speculation Spotlights Studying Religion Ten Tidbits The Tenure Track Theology Tips on Applying Series Tips on Being an Independent Scholar Uncategorized

Select a Month June 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 July 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz