By Julia Silge
Today’s guest post is by Julia Silge. After reading Julia’s analysis of religions in America (“This is the Place, Apparently“) I invited her to teach my readers how to map information about US Religious Adherence by County in R. Julia can be found blogging here or on Twitter.
I took Ari’s free email course for getting started with the choroplethr package last year, and I have so enjoyed making choropleth maps and using them to explore demographic data. Earlier this month, I posted a project on my blog exploring the religious demographics of my adopted home state of Utah that made heavy use of the choroplethr package and today I’m happy to share some of the details of the data set I used here on Ari’s blog and do some new analysis.
The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) publishes data on the number of congregations and adherents for religious groups for each county in the United States. The last large “religion census” they published was in 2010; they make some data exploration and visualization tools available here, the original data file available here, and the codebook available here.
The file made available at the Association of Religion Data Archives is an SPSS file so we’ll need to use the foreign library to access the file.
library(foreign) countiesThe data set includes hundreds of observations for each county in the United States, including number of adherents and rates of adherence for all the denominations (and non-denominational categories) they surveyed. Also included are some larger categories into which all the smaller religious groups are placed.
- Total adherents/adherence rates including all the religious groups
- Evangelical Protestant
- Black Protestant
- Mainline Protestant
- Catholic
- Orthodox
- Other
So for example, an African Methodist Episcopal Church in a certain county would be counted both in the African Methodist Episcopal Church category and the Black Protestant category for …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com
