California and Texas have large increases in their Roman Catholic populations, and Florida has a sizable increase. These three states comprise 25% of the population of the US. This graph, which was supposed to represent growth in various regions, instead portrays a very inaccurate picture of overall growth. Yahoo! News breaks it down correctly:
Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.
Would you have guessed, after looking at the graph above, that the Catholic population in the US increased? Or that the percentage of Catholics in the population dropped one percentage point, which is a drop in the portion of the population of roughly four percentage points (26 to 25)? By focusing on the four percentage point drop in the population portion data (even making this drop appear larger than it is), the graph misses both overall growth and the one percentage point drop in the overall population. USA Today's article text doesn't even mention the overall growth.
Forgoing the big picture to explain a less important point is the second problem with the graph. How would you visually show the information from the quote above? The more I have to create visual data, the more I'm struck by how much a sentence can communicate.
(Yahoo! News even links to the study. I still stand by my last rant, however.)
2 comments:
I was going to say something witty ... but I've got nothing.
I definitely see the trend though. I don't have any close friends that follow an organized religion.
Man, the bible thumpers on some of the forums I frequent are freaking out about this article though...
What's the dominant religion in the NL? Catholic?
In the Netherlands the dominant religion is "no religion." I believe around 40% of people identify as non-religious (in some European countries, like Switzerland, this number is even above 50%). I think Catholicism is next, maybe around a quarter of Dutch people identify themselves as Catholic. There is a growing Muslim minority, around 5% last time I checked, which is causing major tensions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Netherlands
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