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Survey of US Jews 2013, Background and Codebook

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Survey of US Jews 2013, Background and Codebook PEW RESEARCH CENTER’S RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE PROJECT 2013 SURVEY OF U.S. JEWS BACKGROUND AND CODEBOOK VERSION 1.1 OCTOBER 1, 2014 This document provides important information for those wishing to analyze the datasets from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey of U.S. Jews. The survey was the most comprehensive national survey of the Jewish population since the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey. It was designed to explore the identity, experiences, religious beliefs and practices, social and political values, and demographic characteristics of Jews living in the United States. Interviews were conducted by telephone (landlines and cellphones) between Feb. 20 and June 13, 2013, by the research firm Abt SRBI. Interviews were conducted in English and Russian. The survey results were published in the Pew Research Center report, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” There are two datasets analysts may use, a respondent dataset (where there is one row per respondent) and a household dataset (where there is one row per person in the sampled households). The former dataset includes all of the information collected as part of the survey. The latter is a re-shaped version of the respondent dataset that includes a limited number of variables describing the demographic characteristics and Jewish status of all of the people in the surveyed households. The respondent dataset was used to estimate the prevalence of attitudes, beliefs, practices, and experiences of Jews in the United States. The respondent dataset consists of 35,929 cases, reflecting the 35,929 unique respondents who were interviewed as part of the survey and who were either eligible for the long survey administered to self-identified Jews and people who were raised Jewish or had a Jewish parent, or who were deemed ineligible for the long interview but received a short series of demographic questions to facilitate weighting the data. Of the 35,929 respondents included in the dataset, 5,132 were eligible for the main survey and received a full-length interview (including 3,475 who were categorized as Jews in the Pew Research Center’s report on the survey’s findings). The remaining 30,797 did not self-identify as Jewish, were not raised Jewish and did not have a Jewish parent, and were thus ineligible for the full length survey.1 1 As indicated in the methodological appendix to “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 71,151 screening interviews were conducted as part of the study. In most cases, the screening interview determined that the household was ineligible for the full-length interview. Respondents in a randomly selected half of these screened-out households received a short battery of demographic questions to facilitate weighting the data, while the other half were not asked any further questions after determining they were ineligible for the study. The demographic questions were administered to only half of screened-out respondents in an effort to 2 PEW RESEARCH CENTER SURVEY OF U.S. JEWS The household dataset was constructed based on respondent reports about people living in their households and is used primarily to estimate the size of the Jewish population in the U.S. It consists of 95,503 cases, reflecting the 21,447 children and 74,056 adults residing in the 35,929 households selected for participation in the survey. There are several characteristics of these data that are crucial for all analysts to be aware of and to understand before analyzing the data: Key Elements of the Data 1) The variable COMPTYP indicates whether a respondent was eligible for the main survey (because they identified themselves as Jewish or said they were raised Jewish or had a Jewish parent) or ineligible for the main survey. Only eligible respondents received the main interview. Ineligible respondents received only a short, separate battery of demographic questions. Full details of who received which questions are provided below. 2) The variable FINALANALYSISTYPE reflects the coding of the Jewish status of respondents as reported in “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” Syntax documenting how this variable was created is available in the appendix. Analysts wishing to use the same categorization as that employed in “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” should use FINALANALYSISTYPE. Alternatively, analysts are encouraged to operationalize different categories of Jewish identity most appropriate for their particular analyses. 3) All point estimates should be derived from weighted data; point estimates based on unweighted data will not be representative of the U.S. Jewish population. Those whose purpose is to analyze the characteristics of survey respondents should use the WEIGHT variable or the bspw series of bootstrap weights (described below). Those whose purpose is to analyze the characteristics of households and/or the size of various population groups (e.g., the number of Jews by religion) should use the HHWEIGHT variable or the bshw series of bootstrap weights (also described below). 4) In “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” HHWEIGHT and the bshw series of bootstrap weights were used when analyzing the household dataset (i.e., one row for every person in every decrease screening costs so that resources could be concentrated in maximizing the number of eligible respondents reached and interviewed as part of the study. Screened-out respondents who did not receive demographic questions were not weighted for analysis, and are not included in these datasets. These datasets also do not include responses from a small number of respondents who were determined to reside outside of the geographic areas covered by the survey. www.pewresearch.org/religion 3 PEW RESEARCH CENTER SURVEY OF U.S. JEWS surveyed household) to estimate the size of the Jewish population and the age and sex of Jews. They were not used for any other purpose and should not be used to analyze the characteristics of respondents. They should only be used when analyzing the few variables for which the survey collected information as pertains to every member of the household (e.g., Jewish status, age, sex). WEIGHT and the bspw series of bootstrap weights should be used for all other analyses. 5) Analysts should be aware that the weighted counts produced by these datasets are not population estimates, nor should they be interpreted as such. Though they may resemble population counts, this is merely an artifact of the way the data were weighted. Estimating population size cannot be done using the datasets alone; it requires making assumptions about the size of the population covered by the survey and about the Jewish share of the population not covered by the survey. Details on how the Pew Research Center computed its population totals are provided below and in “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” Analysts may wish to use a different categorization of Jewish identity or make different assumptions about the size and Jewish incidence rate of the populations covered and not covered by the survey, and thus compute alternative population estimates. But in no circumstances should the weighted counts in the datasets be misinterpreted for estimates of population size. 6) Each dataset is provided in each of two formats, SPSS and Stata. This is because correctly computing standard errors and test statistics requires using a statistical software program designed to account for the survey’s complex sample design by using the bootstrap weights, and the SPSS Statistics Base package cannot do this. Standard errors and tests of significance can only be calculated using the survey's bootstrap weights. Popular packages that can properly compute standard errors using the bootstrap weights include R, WesVar, Stata, SAS, and SUDAAN. Point estimates can be computed using the SPSS Statistics Base package. Standard errors and test statistics (along with point estimates) can be calculated with the svy commands in Stata using the replicate weights bspw1-bspw256 (for analysis of the respondent dataset, e.g. “svyset [pw=weight], bsrw(bspw*) vce(bootstrap) mse”) or bshw1-bshw256 (for analysis of the household dataset, e.g., “svyset [pw=hhweight], bsrw(bshw*) vce(bootstrap) mse”). Analysts should bear in mind that Stata syntax is case sensitive; though the variables listed in the codebook here may appear in all caps, this is not always the case in the accompanying datasets. The remainder of this document describes how the study was designed and executed, and provides a guide to the variables included in the datasets. Analysts are strongly www.pewresearch.org/religion 4 PEW RESEARCH CENTER SURVEY OF U.S. JEWS encouraged to carefully read this document in its entirety before attempting to analyze the accompanying datasets. www.pewresearch.org/religion 5 PEW RESEARCH CENTER SURVEY OF U.S. JEWS BACKGROUND Determining Eligibility for the Study One of the first and most important decisions made in planning for this study of U.S. Jews was determining who would be eligible to participate in the survey. That is, who is Jewish? There is no single, clear answer to this question. Of course, those whose religion is Judaism are widely considered Jewish. But being Jewish is not primarily or even necessarily a matter of religion. Many people consider themselves Jewish by virtue of their ancestry or ethnicity, even if they do not believe in or practice Judaism as a religion. And some previous studies have counted as Jews people who do not think of themselves as Jewish, if they were raised Jewish or had a Jewish parent. Because there is no scholarly consensus on who exactly qualifies as Jewish, and no clear demarcation of where the line dividing Jews and non-Jews lies, this study takes a broad approach in determining eligibility. The full interview was offered to anyone who described themselves as Jewish or partially Jewish by religion, to anyone who identified themselves as Jewish or partially Jewish aside from religion, and to anyone who was raised Jewish or partially Jewish or had a Jewish parent – even if they do not think of themselves as Jewish.
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