Why People Exaggerate Religious Behavior
by Shankar Vedantam
April 10, 2014 5:16 AM ET
Social scientists have learned you can't always believe what people tell you. An analysis of 3 places in the Muslim world examines whether peoples' reports of religious behavior match what they do.
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/10/301242424/why-people-exaggerate-religious-behavior
4:23 audio at link.
Here's the Abstract of the study:
Testing the Veracity of Self-Reported Religious Practice in the Muslim World
Philip S. Brenner
Author Affiliations
University of Massachusetts–Boston
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this manuscript.
Abstract
Survey findings suggest that predominantly Muslim countries are among the most religious in the world and validate commonly held, but overly simplistic, perceptions of Muslims as extremely and uniformly religious. Existing research has demonstrated that survey estimates can give a distorted view of the reality of levels of religious practice; however, it has thus far focused exclusively on traditionally Christian, advanced Western democracies. To address this oversight, the veracity of self-reported religious practice in the Muslim world is tested using Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey as cases for study. Comparing estimates of prayer from conventional surveys with those from time diaries, marginal rates of overreporting are estimated for each country by sex. The time-use measure of prayer is then imputed for the conventional survey data set to estimate overreporting at the respondent level and to predict overreporting using a measure of religious identity importance. Findings suggest that overreporting of prayer occurs in each country considered, although more consistently for women than for men. Moreover, religious identity importance is strongly correlated with overreporting of prayer, suggesting that a similar mechanism may promote the measurement error for overreported prayer in the Muslim world and overreported church attendance in the West.
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/3/1009
