Documenting Religion Worldwide: Decreasing the Data Deficit

The second article is a paper that was also presented at the IASSIST 2006 conference. The paper titled “Documenting Religion Worldwide: Decreasing the Data Deficit,” by Brian J. Grim, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), and Roger Finke, Pennsylvania State University and Association of Religion Data Archives, was presented in the session “Compare and Contrast: Using Cross-National Data.” The paper is a presentation of the ARDA with data on 238 different countries and territories and some ARDA-coded measures. The International Social Survey Programme, World Values Survey, and the General Social Survey are among the well-known datasets in the archive. The article not only discusses the archive, but also demonstrates research carried out on ARDA materials by the authors in constructing and analyzing some religious indexes. I noticed another demonstration implicit in the article. The ISSP, WVS, and GSS also are available from other archives, so we have two typologies of archive materials: 1) the traditional archives that are geographically based (national, regional, university, etc.) and 2) the subject archives, of which the Association of Religion Data Archives is an example. Some redundancy can be solved with links to central sites, other problems will be more problematic like the version problem of extended metadata being constructed at separate archives.