I feel like it’s fine for the question not to apply to non-religious people. Combined with the Religious Views question, it’s a quick sequence of “are you religious? if yes, what kind? if no, keep going, Moral Views will still apply to you.” If the question included what religion someone last identified with, then you could wind up with “Are you religious?” getting four Athiests and one Theist, then “What religion, including the last religion if you’re now atheist?” getting five Catholics.
Hindu is not a denomination, you are correct, and that’s a case of me copying a previous answer and not thinking about it carefully enough. My inclination is to look up the largest denominations of Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, and split those out as well. That way it’s easy to compare to past surveys (since you can add the different kinds of Buddhism together) and also now is consistent about all being denominations. People with experience or knowledge of the non-Christian variations, I’m open to suggestions, otherwise I will likely go with what Wikipedia suggests.
I agree that it’s fine for the denomination question not to apply to non-religious people. I was just pointing out that we could, if we wanted, collect a little more information that way. (But at the cost of making interpretation slightly harder work, since as you say it would be potentially misleading to just count up answers to the denomination question without cross-referencing them against the religion question. The family-religion questions already have this problem, if problem it be.)
Splitting up the non-Christian religions is probably a good idea, though I have the feeling that “denomination” isn’t really the right term for many of the subdivisions you might want. E.g., you probably don’t want to split up Islam any further than Shia versus Sunni versus Other Muslim, but those would generally be called “branches” or something rather than “denominations”. This is all sheer nitpickery, of course :-).
Wikipedia calls the branches of Islam “Branches or Denominations” and the article on Judaism suggests Commonly used terms are movements, as well as denominations varieties, traditions, groupings, streams, branches, trends, and such.” Nitpickery appreciated, I’m currently happy with the divisions.
The family-religion question does have this issue. If I was going to change it, I’d change it to “What is your family’s religious background, as of when you were growing up?” That makes it fit the question above it, but risks making it harder to compare across years. I’m currently lightly leaning towards leaving it as-is, figuring the value of comparison is worth it.
I feel like it’s fine for the question not to apply to non-religious people. Combined with the Religious Views question, it’s a quick sequence of “are you religious? if yes, what kind? if no, keep going, Moral Views will still apply to you.” If the question included what religion someone last identified with, then you could wind up with “Are you religious?” getting four Athiests and one Theist, then “What religion, including the last religion if you’re now atheist?” getting five Catholics.
Hindu is not a denomination, you are correct, and that’s a case of me copying a previous answer and not thinking about it carefully enough. My inclination is to look up the largest denominations of Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, and split those out as well. That way it’s easy to compare to past surveys (since you can add the different kinds of Buddhism together) and also now is consistent about all being denominations. People with experience or knowledge of the non-Christian variations, I’m open to suggestions, otherwise I will likely go with what Wikipedia suggests.
I agree that it’s fine for the denomination question not to apply to non-religious people. I was just pointing out that we could, if we wanted, collect a little more information that way. (But at the cost of making interpretation slightly harder work, since as you say it would be potentially misleading to just count up answers to the denomination question without cross-referencing them against the religion question. The family-religion questions already have this problem, if problem it be.)
Splitting up the non-Christian religions is probably a good idea, though I have the feeling that “denomination” isn’t really the right term for many of the subdivisions you might want. E.g., you probably don’t want to split up Islam any further than Shia versus Sunni versus Other Muslim, but those would generally be called “branches” or something rather than “denominations”. This is all sheer nitpickery, of course :-).
Wikipedia calls the branches of Islam “Branches or Denominations” and the article on Judaism suggests Commonly used terms are movements, as well as denominations varieties, traditions, groupings, streams, branches, trends, and such.” Nitpickery appreciated, I’m currently happy with the divisions.
The family-religion question does have this issue. If I was going to change it, I’d change it to “What is your family’s religious background, as of when you were growing up?” That makes it fit the question above it, but risks making it harder to compare across years. I’m currently lightly leaning towards leaving it as-is, figuring the value of comparison is worth it.