Dataset

The Statistical Abstract files are distributed by the US Census Department as Microsoft Excel files. These files have data mixed with notes and references, multiple tables per sheet, and, worst of all, the table headers are not easily matched to their rows and columns.

A few files had extraneous characters in the title. These were corrected to be consistent. A few files have a sheet of crufty gibberish in the first slot. The sheet order was shuffled but no data were changed.

The tables that were changed (this is table 74):

0166 0257 0362 0429 0445 0446 0459 0461 0462 0464 0465 0466 0467
0469 0479 0480 0481 0482 0483 0484 0485 0486 0487 0559 0628 0629
1144 1227 1231

This dataset consists of a table of 77 rows and 3 columns.

In thousands. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001 was based on a random digit-dialed telephone survey of 50,281 American residential households in the continental U.S.A (48 states). Respondents were asked to describe themselves in terms of religion with an open-ended question. Interviewers did not prompt or offer a suggested list of potential answers. Moreover, the self-description of respondents was not based on whether established religious bodies, institutions, churches, mosques or synagogues considered them to be members. Quite the contrary, the survey sought to determine whether the respondents themselves regarded themselves as adherents of a religious community. Subjective rather than objective standards of religious identification were tapped by the surveys

Footnotes

1. Refers to the total number of adults in all fifty states. All other figures are based on
   projections from surveys conducted in the continental United States (48 states).
2. Because of the subjective nature of replies to open-ended question, these categories are
   the most unstable as they do not refer to clearly identifiable denominations as much as
   underlying feelings about religion. Thus they may be the most subject to fluctuation over time.