Conrad Hackett

"Opt-in polls have been shown to generate erroneous data for young adults and estimates of relatively rare behaviors." pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

Call for proposals: $10,000 seed grants for research about religion in the U.S. ssrc.org/programs/relig… Great opportunity!

The call for papers for the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) conference in Buenos Aires (February 15-20, 2027) is open until June 10. I'm looking for submissions about religion & demography. #papers" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">conference-system.sisr-issr.org/conferences/co…

David Voas notes YouGov & Bible Society never published the full dataset from the (now retracted) Quiet Revival report. They declined invites for debate. iflscience.com/they-basically…

NEW: More people have left Catholicism than joined it in 21 of the 24 countries we analyzed. pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

Which AI tool can flag ahead of time all the email typos this human doesn't notice until 30 seconds after I hit send?

Unfortunately, a great number of bogus respondents can sneak into opt-in online surveys, polluting the results. Among Orthodox Christians in a recent opt-in survey, about half seemed to be bogus respondents. orthodoxstudies.substack.com/p/what-the-qui…

Say Trump is somewhat or very religious Republicans 50% White evangelicals 49% Catholics 29% Black Protestants 13% Atheists 12% Democrats 10% pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

“For journalists, it was exciting to write about. For a lot of Christian believers, it was something that they wanted to be true,” said Conrad Hackett, a demographer at Pew Research

25% of American adults said they did not read or listen to any book in the last year, not even part of a book. pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

The Quiet Revival report was retracted after YouGov acknowledged problems with bogus survey respondents. In this NYT story, I comment on why the initial report got so much attention. nytimes.com/2026/04/09/wor…

NEW: We highlight 3 changes in measurement of religious “nones” & call for organizations that make these changes to study their effects. From Matthew Conrad & me. surveypractice.org/article/159509…

Stories about people joining the Catholic church tend to overlook the related phenomenon of people leaving. In the @pewresearch Religious Landscape Study, for every adult who reported becoming Catholic, there were 8.4 former Catholics.

@JLLiedl x.com/conradhackett/…

If we add a reasonable expectations of 2026 convert numbers to the end of this graph (assuming the last number on the original is 2024, and 2026 numbers are ~80% higher), it would look something like this. That leaves a v different impression than I think many people took away.

The Ipsos MORI study mentioned below uses survey panels that anyone can join online. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to determine whether surveys use probability sampling, in which respondents are recruited by researchers offline using random sampling (based on addresses or phone numbers), or whether surveys rely on less rigorous sampling methods.

It was interesting that the earlier rise generated a lot of enthusiasm but the subsequent drop was largely ignored. If you look at the results for London, there was also a big swing among respondents claiming to be Londoners. Bogus respondents may be more likely to claim to be young and located in London.

Was thinking about the Quiet Revival polling thing and looked back at the YouGov general polling on belief in God. The amount it varies over a short period of time is v striking. For 18-34s belief in God was 45% in January 2025 and 27% a year later yougov.com/en-gb/trackers…