In 2014, the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank, conducted its second Religious Landscape Study, in which they interviewed over 35000 Americans from all 50 states in order to understand the varying religious, social, and political views that are upheld by the people of the nation.
For my final project in Sexuality in World Religions, I chose to dive into the data provided by the Religious Landscape Study and design visualizations that would showcase American’s views on various issues, including abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage. Utilizing Tableau, I created maps, stacked bar graphs, and scatter plots to showcase the interesting data collected through the study. This data story can be viewed below.
These maps highlight various factors by statewide attitudes. This data was again taken from the Religious Landscape Study, highlighting religiosity, abortion attitudes, same-sex marriage acceptance, and conservativity by state. These maps highlight the clustered nature of these social and human-rights issues, with evident patterns emerging, especially in southern states. This is what I find the most interesting but not surprising, that a high degree of religiosity is associated with more negative attitudes towards abortion, more negative attitudes towards same sex marriage, and a higher proportion identifying as conservative. This last metric is trickier to measure, however, because many of the individuals surveyed identified as more moderate over more conservative or liberal.
These stacked bar graphs showcase the proportion of respondents from each featured religion responding for and against specific social metrics, including attitude towards abortion, attitude towards homosexuality, attitude towards same-sex marriage, and political identities. These visualizations also show a pattern of certain religious traditions being more progressive towards social issues with other traditions being less progressive. Followers of the Buddhist and Jewish traditions consistently show more acceptance of these issues across the board, while Evangelical Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons consistently show less acceptance across the board. Interestingly, these mostly correspond with political leanings for each religion. A decent proportion of each religion responded with having no lean; interestingly, Jehovah’s Witness’ primarily identified with having no political lean. This can mean one of two things: that either followers truly have no lean or are independent, which seems less likely when put in context of the other social metrics presented, or that followers are less politically engaged, which could be consistent for the religion, as it prohibits its followers from running for public office.
These analyses show some interesting trends. First, there is a strong correlation between the proportion of individuals from each religion accepting homosexuality and the proportion of individuals from each religion accepting same sex marriage. While there is an extremely strong trend (r^2 value = .97 and p-value < .0001), the relationship is not 1:1. From what I predict, this comes from more individuals accepting that homosexuality exists and accepting homosexual individuals while still not being completely comfortable allowing the use of religious institutions and buildings for legal marriages, which I believe highlights the divine view of the importance of marriage in several of these traditions. My last analysis shows that there is a decently strong correlation with identifying as a democrat/democrat leaning and accepting homosexuality for each religion. There is not a similar trend for conservatism–the best fit line is pretty flat.
All in all, I think this was an extremely interesting project to undertake, and I am glad I was able to use my passion for analytics and visualization to work with some very unique and salient data. I learned so much from this project, including the importance of finding clear and properly collected data, as well as the importance of keeping a diverse audience in mind while creating these graphics.
Citations:
- “How Religious Is Your State.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-state/?state=alabama.
- “Views about same-sex marriage by state.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/views-about-same-sex-marriage/by/state/.
- “Views about abortion by state.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/views-about-abortion/by/state/.
- “Views about abortion by state.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/political-ideology/by/state/.
- “Views about homosexuality.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/views-about-homosexuality/.
- “Views about abortion.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/views-about-abortion/.
- “Views about same-sex marriage.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/views-about-same-sex-marriage/.
- “Party affiliation.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/.
- “Political ideology.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/political-ideology/.
I love analytics as well! This was probably the project I got the most out of because I am science and math oriented and this was super easy to interpret. Your explanation was also super easy to understand and was explained thoroughly. I liked your choice of controversial issues since they are such big conflicts within the secular and religious worlds.
This is very interesting! I love how you incorporated these interactive graphs in your post
What an interesting concept! After learning in class about what the major world religions traditionally believe, it is fascinating – and even surprising – to see where modern Americans, according to religious classification, place themselves on these issues. I found it interesting that Buddhists were more politically liberal, accepting of homosexuality, and accepting of same-sex marriage than were religiously unaffiliated Americans.
Love the visualization aspect! It makes data just so much more pleasing. I also think you picked highly relevant, highly interesting facts. It definitely was curated for the individual who wants to see the correlations of some common beliefs/views and religion. Well done!
What an interesting project! I was very interested in reading your presentation because I have always been fascinated but the link between religion and political issues. Your use of data and graphs was a great was of presenting quantitative information, especially because most of these topics argue with often more qualitative evidence. Overall, great job and I cannot wait to investigate these trends in my own life.
I personally have never really understood much about statistics so seeing the visualisation of this kind of data is really helpful to me, although some of the graphs are still difficult to understand. The graphic is kind of hard to use and interpret but I’m assuming that that’s just WordPress being bad at transferring it. It might just be because it’s what I’m already very interested in, but the abortion chart was one of my favourites. I found it really intriguing that the data on the Republican side was more spread out than the data on the Democrat side despite that fact that both sides are looking at the same religions. I also found it really interesting that Orthodox Christian and Catholic are the most consistently on the trend line and in the middle, that’s never something I would have thought about or considered.
Thank you for a very easy to understand, concise and visually pleasing representation of a very current and important topic.