All commits #1
All commits #1
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| The paper we have chosen to replicate is: "The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States," written by Hout, Greeley, and Wilde (2001). The question that the authors are trying to answer is: Over the course of the last century, why has affiliation with "mainline" Protestantism declined, while affiliation with "conservative" Protestantism has increased in the United States? (Broadly speaking, "conservative" refers to more theologically conservative denominations and "mainline" refers to more liberal denominations.) To date, almost all sociological scholarship related to this question has assumed that mainline decline is the result of people converting/switching from mainline to conservative Protestantism. This paper argues that denominational switching actually accounts for *none* of the mainline decline. They argue that the most significant variable explaning mainline decline is *higher fertility* among conservative Protestants. In this paper, they use GSS data to test 4 hypotheses about the source of mainline decline: 1) higher fertility of conservative Protestants, 2) higher rate of mainline to conservative switching, 3) higher rate of apostasy among mainliners, 4) higher inflow of outsiders to conservative Protestant denominations. Looking at all cohorts born between 1900 and 1973, the authors develop demographic simulation models based on the variables of fertility, religious origins, and current religion. They then make counterfactual predictions in order to isolate the relative contributions of each of these variables to the observed decline in mainline affiliation. | ||
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Very interesting paper. Also interesting that "switching accounts for none of mainline decline" . Maybe add some information of the method/ model used in the summary.
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| When we add in 8 more years of data and 8 more cohorts, we see that fertility has continued to decline for both mainline and conservative Protestants. Between 1973 and 1980, the slope of decline for conservatives appears to be steeper than that of mainlines, which suggests that perhaps conservative fertility rates may intersect with mainline fertility rates within the next decade. This would be an interesting phenomenon to investigate further in the future, as we have several hypotheses about why fertility rates between the two denominations may be converging (e.g. rising levels of education among conservatives, later age of marriage for conservative women). |
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Nice. Also, if you want to focus on the difference in fertility rates between the two groups, when not plot that directly for each year and then do a loess on that difference?
In general, it is always good to plot the quantity of interest and not ask the reader to do the transformation you want.
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Cool! A nice project and interesting extension finding. My main question is whether you can automate some of the recoding that you do - perhaps create functions for the different recodes that you can plug into dplyr. I think this might save work by cutting down on repetition and also minimize the chance of mistakes.
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Nice work. Your commenting is excellent throughout the project.
Merge pull request #1 from JBirdsall/master
Merge pull request #1 from gracetien/master
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