In my previous post I did a quick overview of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey carried out by the Pew Research Center. To supplement those initial impressions, I’m posting a color-coded table of group performance within the subcategories of questions that Pew delineated in Section III of is report. I want to note this is based off of Pew’s presented data, not the raw data and thus is subject to a degree of rounding error, though I don’t think that it will change the overall picture.
Click the table for a version with larger text and fewer abbreviations. A (hopefully) more colorblind friendly version can be found at the bottom of the post (after the jump).
The percentages shown are the percentage of correct answers that survey respondents in the selected religious categories gave for each of the listed question categories (which each consist of 2-5 questions). Greener cells reflect a higher relative group performance for a given category, redder cells reflect lower performance, and yellow cells are close to the median performance.
I’ve excluded Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics from the table as both groups generally performed poorly and thus their inclusion would have distracted from the patterns reflecting inter-religious differences in religious knowledge. In light of this, I calculated the average number of correct answers for just the groups shown by a weighted average, which is the information contained in the “Subtotal” row.
I’ll be following these two posts up with a longer opinion and analysis covering the whole report some time in the next few days. In the mean time, I highly recommend that interested readers look at Pew’s summary, more detailed breakdown, and analysis of factors outside of religious categorization. For the technical description of the poll’s mechanics see Appendix A and Appendix B (PDF).
This table is identical to the one above except the red-to-green scheme has been replaced with red-to-blue scheme. Like above, it links to a larger version.
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