Peace, it's a different situation in the U.S.

Under "Methodology", they say:

"The value of this unique series of national surveys, which allows scientific monitoring of change over time, has been recognized by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The Bureau itself is constitutionally precluded from such an inquiry into religion, and so has incorporated NSRI/ARIS findings into its official publication the Statistical Abstract of the United States since 2003."

The survey used an "unprompted, open-ended key question "What is your religion, if any?" 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 or institutions considered them to be members. To the contrary, the surveys sought to determine whether the respondents regarded themselves as adherents of a religious community. The surveys tap subjective rather than objective standards of religious identification."

However, then they had to categorize the responses they got...

They also note:

"The population we know least about, those who do not know or refuse to reveal their religious identification, grew the most rapidly. This reflects social changes in attitudes and in American society over the past two decades. There is less willingness to participate in surveys of all types by the American public. Although this leaves a lacuna in the ARIS statistics the overall rate of refusal to participate is low by international standards. For example, the rate of refusal to the religion question in the national U.K. Government 2001 Census was higher at seven percent." (It was 5.2% in the 2008 U.S. data.)

I think there are interesting depths to be plumbed in these data. We often surround ourselves with, or at least relate most closely to people who have similar world views. Sometimes that's exacerbated by larger geographical effects on the population we're in. As we've seen in the past couple years of politics, people tend to operate as if everyone believes like they do, and those who disagree are in a neglegable minority. It's useful to have some pretty objective data to say what's really out there.

There were three sets of questions: the first being a couple of simple questions to have the interviewee identify their religion (or lack thereof, the second detailing specific beliefs/behaviors, and the third being a variety of demographic measures. I think it's too bad that the second set were only used with a subset of 1000, rather than the 54,461 for the rest.

Those questions (here) were an interesting assortment, and the results are not reported there (except for the "existance of God" question, and the baptism/marriage/funeral questions), though they're touched on a bit in the text. They've got more reporting and analysis to do.

~ Desert Dancer