Week 13 — Identity, Belief, and the Honors Track: Reading the Religious Landscape — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 12 of the term — read the religious-affiliation figures and one school's tracking figure, work out what they say, and explain to someone outside sociology why a rise of 81 percent is not 81 percent of anyone.

This week you learned what schools do besides teach, how the conflict critiques read tracking and credentials, how advantage travels through a school, how Durkheim, Weber, and Marx read religion, and how to read a survey of religious identity. In Week 2 you learned to keep percentage points apart from percent change and to read any statistic four ways; this week you use those habits on a real survey of religious identity and on one school's tracking figure. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain a finding to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these figures, all from this week's chapter, plus one illustrative case:

• Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study (36,908 respondents in the newest round, fielded from July 2023 to March 2024): 62% of U.S. adults identified as Christian in 2023–24, 29% as religiously unaffiliated, and 7% with other religions. In 2007, 78% identified as Christian and 16% as unaffiliated; in 2014, 71% and 23%. These figures describe self-reported religious identity, not belief or attendance.
• An illustrative case invented for this assignment: a middle school that places 60 of its 240 entering students in an honors track and the rest in a standard track.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. In Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study, 16% of U.S. adults were religiously unaffiliated in 2007 and 29% in 2023–24. By how many percentage points did the unaffiliated figure rise?
2. In the same study, the unaffiliated figure rose from 16% of U.S. adults in 2007 to 29% in 2023–24. By what percent did that figure grow, measured against its 2007 size?
3. An illustrative middle school places 60 of its 240 entering students in an honors track. What percent of the entering students are in the honors track?
4. In Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study, 78% of U.S. adults identified as Christian in 2007 and 62% in 2023–24. By how many percentage points did the Christian figure fall?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it. For problem 1, say what the figure measures and over whom, write the change in percentage points, and name one limit, such as that reported identity is not belief. For problem 2, explain how 81.25 percent and 13 percentage points describe the same change in two different units. For problem 3, name the sorting as tracking, say what a functionalist reading and a conflict reading would each make of the honors track, and say what the percentage cannot show. For problem 4, say whether falling reported Christian identity proves secularization, the decline of religion's influence over a society's institutions and lives, and whether the figures show a correlation, a cause, or neither.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your neighbor has never studied sociology and sees a headline: "Religious nones up 81 percent: nearly a third of Americans are now atheists." Your neighbor asks whether that is right. Write a 3–5 sentence message to your neighbor that explains in everyday words the difference between a rise of 81 percent and a rise of 13 percentage points, says that the survey counts the religious identity people report rather than what they believe, and names one limit, such as that a figure for all adults tells you nothing about any one person you know. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate message can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who hears that the number of people who bike to work in an illustrative city went "up 50 percent" and asks whether half the city now bikes. Model answer: "No. The bikers went from about 4 out of every 100 commuters to about 6 out of every 100. That is a rise of 2 percentage points, which is 50 percent of where it started, so most people still get to work some other way. The limit is that the survey asked about one ordinary week, so it can't tell you how anyone gets to work in winter."

Use that pattern for your message to your neighbor, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single data-reading report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it;
• your message to your neighbor, explaining the difference between percent and percentage points in everyday words, saying that the survey counts reported identity rather than belief, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the figures with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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