Religious Ecology of 378 American Cities, 1906-1936

This dataset was created for the research reported in Religion, Deviance and Social Control by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (1996). This dataset compiles information regarding the religious composition of 378 cities in the United States from 1906 to 1936 and contains observations on church membership, growth and suicide rates.

Data File

Cases: 378
Variables: 90
Weight Variable: None

Data Collection

Date Collected: 1906 - 1936

Collection Procedures

Religious data were collected from the 1910, 1919, 1930 and 1941 U.S. Government publications titled Religious Bodies.

1910 Religious Bodies: 1906. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

1919 Religious Bodies: 1906. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

1930 Religious Bodies: 1906. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

1941 Religious Bodies: 1906. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Sampling Procedures

The Census of Religious Bodies considered only cities with a population of 25,000 or greater. Thus, many of the cities have missing values for earlier years, because they were still too small to be reported in the census volumes.

Principal Investigators

William Sims Bainbridge

Related Publications

Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge. 1996. Religion, Deviance, and Social Control. New York: Routledge.

Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge. 1985. The Future of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bainbridge, William S. and Rodney Stark. 1981. "Suicide, Homicide, and Religion: Durkheim Reassessed." Annual Review of the Social Sciences of Religion 5: 33-56.