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Notes -
Oh it’s worse than that. There’s three methods of counting church attendance-
is survey data- just asking people how often they go to church. For social desirability reasons, this tends to be biased upwards, but it’s probably close enough for government work to the monthly rate, or the Christmas and Easter rate.
is checking attendance counts at the churches themselves, which suffers from poor and inconsistent methodology. There’s also usually no way to tell which people are going to church here.
is cell phone tracking data. This is almost certainly an undercount for a wide variety of technical reasons- notably reception tends to be worse in church buildings and attendees tend to ping less than elsewhere because of behavior at church(lots of people have their cell phones off, for example).
So basically we have no way of knowing what actual church attendance rates are, except that the ‘official’ rates are overestimates.
Interesting, I never thought about it like that, but you're probably right!
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