Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [RELIGION] Fwd: New research on religiosity and charity

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Jonathan King wrote:

> OK, so this book came out in 2006, and I know there has been some back 
> and forth about it. The good news is that it is genuinely social science 
> research that seems to be done with some care. The bad news is that is 
> genuinely social science research, so tiny changes in framing the 
> problem, choosing covariates, or specifying the model can make a big 
> difference.

This looked pretty good, including reader comments, but I haven't had the 
chance to read it carefully:

http://volokh.com/posts/1164012942.shtml

A few questions immediately come to mind:  How much of charitable giving 
is due to giving to a church?  How much is based on self-report?  (People 
who want to lower their tax burden may overstate their charitable giving.) 
To what extent are conclusions based on percent of income/wealth and to 
what extent on raw dollars?  Is age always taken into account (older 
people are more conservative than younger people and also are probably 
more likely to give than to save for their future).  How can we know that 
liberals are less likely to return incorrect change to a cashier? 
(Assuming an adequate study design -- was this conservative/liberal 
difference due entirely to counting the change [e.g., libs don't count 
their pennies but conservatives do] and would it be the same if the 
person were short-changed?).

I saw a report about the book on John Stossel's segment on ABC's 20/20. 
One thing was clear:  In a comparison of South Dakota and San Francisco, 
they looked at giving to Salvation Army, but that's a religious charity, 
so I would expect less giving by the non-religious.  Stephen's review of 
the book claims that religious liberals and conservatives do not differ in 
charitable giving.


> As a side note, religiosity can be a very useful concept, but it's not 
> necessarily a very simple one. One of the interesting things about it is 
> that it is reasonably heritable, but not completely stable over the 
> lifecourse. (If I remember correctly, it's one of the traits where 
> heritbility estimates *increase* over the lifecourse.)

I think there might have been some bakc-and-forth on that issue too.  The 
old standard line was "what religion you are is mostly determined by 
family environment, but how religious you are is as heritable as most 
personality traits (say 30% to 40%)."


> I will look at the full article maybe tonight when I have more time.

I'll be interested in your comments.

Mike

_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion