Well most religions don't require as much to remain a member as being a jw ,so makes sense that a works based religion has higher turn over . Completely different than most religions that require nothing , maybe a tenth of your earnings and you never really get kicked out for anything .
Hitchens with Maher - JWs highest turnover rate.
by Mincan 33 Replies latest jw friends
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slimboyfat
Hasn't it already been pointed out that the size of the sample is too small to make the results of this survey reliable? One wonders whether, if the retention figure presented was much better for Jehovah's Witnesses, apostates here would not be much more eager to scrutinize the methods and sample size of the survey. For instance are only active Witnesses counted as such, or inactive ones who still consider themselves notionally Witnesses? And how does this compare with the self-identification patterns of other groups? In other words are we comparing like with like? There is too great a tendency here to jump on any "good" news ("I always suspected Jehovah's Witnesses lost more children than other religions") and discredit any "bad" news out of hand. (Re: the most recent service report: "Oh obviously they are inflating the figures now - I just don't believe they increased 3%")
I personally am very sceptical about the claim that Witnesses have lower retention rates of offspring than other religions. The fact is that Witness growth has to be accounted for somehow. And it's funny that the people who have been celebrating the "finding" that most Witness children leave the faith have not drawn the obvious conclusion as to where their growth must be coming from if that truly is the case. If the growth of the Witnesses cannot be explained by children being retained then doesn't that mean that their preaching must be more effective than it is sometimes given credit for? If they lose more children than other religions, yet still manage to grow faster than other religions, then that means they must be pretty good at getting and keeping converts does it not? And it's funny that apostates on here are loath to draw that logical conclusion from the other claims made. Instead it is often claimed that the ministry is ineffective. But again the "problem" of Witness growth has to be explained somehow. And if you insist both that the retention of Witness youths is low and that their preaching is useless, then there remains to explain the rather inconvenient fact of their continued growth that outstrips other religious groups.
My suspicion is that a proper survey would reveal Jehovah's Witnesses are pretty good at keeping children in the faith compared with other groups and that their preaching is also moderately successful compared with the recruitment strategies of other churches. Their overall growth indicates that at least one of those two propositions must be true in any case.
Slim
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scotsman
I'm with slimboyfat & Heathen
People leave the JWs and no longer identify with them, unlike many other groups. I get the impression from lapsed Catholic/Jews/Mormons and Muslims that they still identify with their faith of birth while no longer practising it. Few lapsed JWs will label themselves as such, even if they are believers, because it's instilled into them that unless you are Witnessing you're not a JW.
This would explain the difference in some of the figures.
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daniel-p
While I understand the limitations of the JW sample size used in this survey--most JWs won't know the difference. In other words, the survey will do its work, regardless of how reliable the results are. ;)
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Leolaia
The sample is indeed rather small but it is probably the best-conducted study of its kind thus far, at least in terms of constructing its sample. The advantage over other studies is that they evenly sampled the population as opposed to starting with the groups themselves (which can then furnish data on outgroup movement). Unfortunately, because of the relative size of JWs compared to other groups, they'd have to sample at least 140,000 people just to get 1,000 JWs. But if the mean of the samples is very different from the model distribution, then you can find a high significance with a small sample. It all depends on the distribution itself and unfortunately this public release does not provide the actual data...maybe there is a more detailed document that gives the data, along with probabilities and significance of the results.
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steve2
Some compelling comments have been made about the need for caution when quoting percentages of drop-outs etc based on this survey. Most surveys that look at smaller subgroups within a larger population use the technique of "over-sampling" of smaller subgroups - a recognised statistical solution that ensures suffficient numbers of smaller subgroups are canvassed so more representative conclusions can be made about the composition of the smaller subgroups. Does anyone know whether over-sampling of smaller subgroups was used in the present survey? I don't.
What I do know is that the broad conclusion about the high turnover among those raised in the JWs fits with the observable facts as reported by many posters, including me:
We know from direct observation about the high drop-out rate of young people raised in the religion...and it's not a recent phenomenon either. In the congregations I belonged to in the 1950s through the early 1980s, young ones dropped out in droves (okay a few came back when they got older - but they were the exceptions). I once estimated that, of the roughly forty of my peers who were also raised in the religion about the same time as me, 9 remained in the religion. Of my high school JW peers (which at its peak numbered 10 in a small rural high school), none continued in the religion; in fact, of that group, I was the last to leave in my laste twenties. It seemed to be the same throughtout New Zealand: The older the "young" ones were, the more who left. Come age 15 or 16, the door is often wide open, despite parents' desperate attempts to close it before their children leave. We all know that it is not unusual for even elders to have raised several children in the religion and most of them have faded or got kicked out.
So, yes, we need to interpret with caution the suvery findings. Yet, it also helps to temper its conclusions with a dose of our own observations: Among the JWs, the drop-out rate of young ones is extremely high.
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Leolaia
The sample was weighted not to oversample lower-represented groups but to match the US Census Bureau's demographic data. Appendix 4 in the survey discusses their methodology and sampling. They show that there is a margin of error by about 7.5% for the JWs, whereas other better-represented groups have a lower margin of error, e.g. 1.5% for Catholics. The results on retention of childhood religion, btw, is well beyond the margin of error for JWs, i.e. it is not simply due to a sampling error.
I just did my own rough statistical test with their sampling of JWs and Hindus, which are the groups closest in sampling size. I made a contingency table for their figures on marital status and at three degrees of freedom, the data yields a chi-square of 41.5 and a probability of 0.000. Thus the greater proportion of married status among Hindus and the greater proportion of "never married" status among JWs is statistically significant. So I think the data is not necessarily unreliable, at least as an indicator.
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slimboyfat
But a bigger problem may be in the self-definitions applied and how the questions were framed. A lapsed Catholic may be more inclined to call themselves a Catholic than a lapsed JW. Yet the lapsed JW may feel stronger that JWs have "the truth" than the lapsed Catholic. As someone else said, it is drummed into Witnesses that unless they go on the ministry they don't count as Witnesses. For most other groups I would suggest affiliation is more fluid.
Experience may tell us that a lot of Witnesses who grow up in the faith leave. Experience also tells me at least that most of those who do leave nevertheless continue to believe it is the "truth".
Incidentally Beckford's sociological study from the 1970's, which was unfortunately also problematic because it was on a small scale, showed that Witnesses in Britain at that time retained a high percentage of their young. Rodney Stark also used the assumption that Witness retention of offspring is high to explain their historically impressive growth.
Slim
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Leolaia
That's true, and they mention this as well as a possible contributor of additional error. That's why I suggest that it is probably more of an indicator than a measure. But from my reading of the questions, which asks for their "present religion" or "what religion or demonination they identify with", I think this would potentially include those disfellowshipped or drifted away but who still believe -- it could still be their religion even if they do not practice it. They would not be counted in the Society's statistics, but they would count as a "Jehovah's Witness" in this survey. So I think it probably is already more inclusive than the other way around, which would mean that the proportion of those who do indicate that they presently have no religion (but who were raised in the JW religion) is probably lower than the total proportion of those who leave. In other words, it may underestimate the losses rather than overestimate them -- if one judges by the official JW definition of a JW as an active publisher. It could be said however that the definition in the official statistics is too restrictive and that the Pew survey may better represent the proportion of the population that identifies or believes the JW religion.
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slimboyfat
I still think it is possible JWs underrepresented themselves in response to the questions. But say you are right Leolaia and it does accurately give an indication that the dropout rate of Witnesses born in the faith is higher than for other groups - how do you personally square that with the concurrent finding that Witnesses are growing faster than most other religions? Do you think that is all down to their highly successful preaching?
Witnesses can give weird answers on these sorts of surveys. In Britain in 2001 there were around 120,000 active Witnesses, yet on the census return only 70,651 entered "Jehovah's Witness" as their religion. Why was that? Is that proof that Watchtower statistics are lies? No I don't think so. Respondants were allowed or even encouraged to adopt the more general heading "Christian" which many Witnesses seemed to have opted for, viewing themselves as the "true Christians" as it were. On the other hand I heard some crazy Witnesses at the time warning others not to put "Jehovah's Witness" on the form because the list of names would be used to persecute us during the Great Tribulation. I don't know how widespread that idea was, but there is certainly a minority of Witnesses who are prone to that sort of paranoia.
That UK census involved a different set of problems than the one we are discussing here so I am not saying that it provides an explanation for inaccuracy in this case. It just shows we need to be careful with these sorts of results. Often those who frame the questions are interested in the bigger picture, and the details of smaller groups like the Witnesses are distorted as a result.