Declining Interest In Mormonism

[Meadowchik]

Yes, that's true. Our study covered a whole range of topics and categories and countries. It showed that online search volumes are reasonably representative of offline interest and attitudes. It benchmarked this against several metrics (sales, attitudes, memberships etc).

So are you arguing that online search volume for terms related to Mormonism on Google and Wikipedia is NOT representative of overall long and short term levels of interest? What's your evidence for this? Hopefully something more substantial than "because I said so."

I merely asked how consumer-based data can be relied upon to draw conclusions about non-consumer-based activity.

There's nothing for me to disprove. The problem is that your dataset does not address the question of interest in Mormonism, unless there's something you forgot to add.

[hagoth7]

" 112,000 out of 15 million .7% of Mormons want to know when God's mouthpiece speaks."

To interpret being able and willing to use tweeting as equivalent to desiring to know the word of God reduces to non-existence all those faithful members who are too poor to own tech that tweets, too uneducated to use it or who chose not to have tech around for whatever reason (such as my parents who still managed to eagerly await the Ensign each month), as well as many others who feel they need to simplify their lives or see adding yet another social media form into their lives as too distracting from doing the good they are trying to accomplish.

Amen.

 

I'm reasonably familiar with online tech, but have never bothered to get a Twitter account, a Pinterest account, etc.

 

I guess that somehow means I and millions of others must be slacking...

[canard78]

The periods covered were too short to have any real meaning, and the google trend for 2004 - 2006 was primarily informed by the rape-murder by a Joseph Smith of Carlie Brucia (no Mormon connnection).

 

Naturally, the Romney campaign and the the Broadway musical "The Book of Mormon," and the like will pique interest, and everything else looks like a relative decline.  We need far more sophisticated and long-term analysis.

 

To provide you with another data point, the data for the Joseph Smith page on Wikipedia and the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints" page on Wikipedia.

 

As you can see the correlation is incredibly strong so people showing interest in "Joseph Smith" are almost certainly looking for the religious leader and not the criminal.

http://www.wikipediatrends.com/?query[]=Joseph%20Smith&query[]=The%20Church%20of%20Jesus%20Christ%20of%20Latter-day%20Saints

[canard78]

I merely asked how consumer-based data can be relied upon to draw conclusions about non-consumer-based activity.

There's nothing for me to disprove. The problem is that your dataset does not address the question of interest in Mormonism, unless there's something you forgot to add.

 

A Mormon is a consumer of a service. If you're a member of a club, organisation or even a bank you're still engaging with an organisation.

 

Besides, this is something we've validated across multiple behaviours, interests and topics. The way we search for information on "consumer packaged goods" (if that's what you meant) is very similar to the way we search for non CPG queries.

[Robert F. Smith]

You've made some fairly authoritative statements there Robert. What's your data to support this following:

 

 

How do you know? You're looking at a 7 year trend on Wikipedia and a 10 year trends on Google. CFR that these are "too short to have any real meaning."

 

Regarding Joseph Smith. You're right that there may have been a few 'event' spikes during that trial. But Wikipedia data isn't influenced by non-matches as the data is for traffic to the Joseph Smith page on the site. Also, Google provides the ability to filter results within topic areas. Here's the (Beta) data for 'Joseph Smith (Religious leader).' Google can track not only the search term but also where you clicked next after the term to classify what you were searching for based on where you went next.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=%2Fm%2F044mp

 

 

You're right that big media events will have an influence on search volumes, but they're different to looking at base levels over time. Usually an event spike is short term (dependent on the length of time the event is in the media). You can filter these out when looking at a long term trend. The results of our study showed that event search has little impact and relationship with base level interest. The base is effectively the level of interest we'd see trending if the events were taken out. When you look at the base trend over time, interest in Mormonism is declining.

 

 

CFR

Being age 74, I am not much impressed by 7 - 10 year "base levels," and I don't think any good statistician would be either.  I don't have any specific data to share, but I am very uneasy with such broad conclusions derived from data, much of which may be accidental.  Your trend for 2004 - 2006 here, for example, still is based on going to "Joseph Smith" in direct response to the notorious rape-murder case.  Google takes the inquirer to the Joseph Smith Prophet site willy-nilly, even though the inquirer did not want it.  That sort of thing happens to me all the time, and it requires human intervention to find the correct site among all those Google brings up.

 

Even though we did not have comparable digital systems available in the far past, you might want to ask what sort of spikes George Romney would have gotten on Google (had it been available) when he was speaking at the Republican National Convention in Frisco in 1964 -- he was being booed by the crowd of racist delegates there when he tried to get a civil rights plank on the official Republican Platform.  There might have been a spike when the govt of Arizona arrested so many pligs in Short Creek in 1953, and took so many of their children into custody.  What sort of base level could we tease out of the data over the past 65 years since I was baptized (when there were only a million Mormons)?  I just don't buy your short-term conclusions.  They tell me nothing.

Edited September 17, 2015 by Robert F. Smith

[canard78]

Being age 74, I am not much impressed by 7 - 10 year "base levels," and I don't think any good statistician would be either.  I don't have a specific data to share, but I am very uneasy with such broad conclusions derived from data, much of which may be accidental.  Your trend for 2004 - 2006 here, for example, still is based on going to "Joseph Smith" in direct response to the notorious rape-murder case.  Google takes the inquirer to the Joseph Smith Prophet site willy-nilly, even though the inquirer did not want it.  That sort of thing happens to me all the time, and it requires human intervention to find the correct site among all those Google brings up.

 

Even though we did not have comparable digital systems available in the far past, you might want to ask what sort of spikes George Romney would have gotten on Google (had it been available) when he was speaking at the Republican National Convention in Frisco in 1964 -- he was being booed by the crowd of racist delegates there when he tried to get a civil rights plank on the official Republican Platform.  There might have been a spike when the govt of Arizona arrested so many pligs in Short Creek in 1953, and took so many of their children into custody.  What sort of base level could we tease out of the data over the past 65 years since I was baptized (when there were only a million Mormons)?  I just don't buy your short-term conclusions.  They tell me nothing.

 

Really Robert? Are you one of those "good statisticians" you talk about? I work with PHD statisticians. Some of the best in the business. A 2-year trend (with daily data points) is significant. This is my job. I service several multi-million $ market research contracts with many of the biggest organisations in the world. Let me assure you that statistically speaking, this is significant, even if you don't find it very impressive. 7-10 years is not short term and your murder reference has no influence on the Wikipedia data.

 

Like I said in the lastest post, if you run a query for the church's Wikipedia page in parallel with the Joseph Smith page they have a very strong pattern (check the link). This shows that the Joseph Smith interest and the Church interest is both falling.

 

Whether you buy it or not doesn't really make a difference. The data speaks for itself.

[cinepro]

You've made some fairly authoritative statements there Robert. What's your data to support this following:

Honestly, I wouldn't pay much attention to Robert. Ultimately, you've just pointed out a few sets of data points that might indicate something about peoples' interest in the Church. Obviously, we can't know exactly what this data means, there could be tons of different variables that effect these particular searches (Robert pointed out one possible influence).

And I would bet dollars to donuts that the Church leadership (or at least the IT department) is very, very aware of this data as well.

 

I would like to know what caused the spikes in searches for "Joseph Smith" on January 17, 2012 and November 8, 2012.  I don't recall anything like the Church essays or something similar being published that would have sparked interest.

[cinepro]

This one's good.  Guess what those blips are every six months

 

http://www.wikipediatrends.com/Thomas_S._Monson.html

 

 

"General Conference - The Heartbeat of the Church"

Edited September 17, 2015 by cinepro

[Stargazer]

Luminaries - interesting description.   

Many would say mouthpiece of God.

        112,000 out of 15 million       .7% of Mormons want to know when God's mouthpiece speaks.

        112,000 out of 5 million (considered active)    2.24% want to know.  

 

Oh come on.  Anything actually "wrong" with "luminaries"?  Someone who burns brightly, is not at all an inapt term under the circumstances, is it?

 

Not sure how many Mormons use Twitter, probably quite a few less than the number you cite for active.  I don't know anyone in my ward who uses Twitter.  Many of them are on Facebook, but not Twitter.

 

But why do you assume that only Mormons would follow Pres. Monson on Twitter?  Probably the majority of his followers are LDS, but I'm sure there are non-LDS there, too.

 

Pope Francis is on Twitter, too!  @Pontifex - since 2012, with

• 658 tweets
• 7.12 million followers

There are 1.2 billion Catholics, so the Pope's followership rate among Catholics is 0.6%.  I'd say that's 0.1% less than President Monson's followership rate.  Nice!  But the Pope (or, rather more probably, his office) tweets a whole lot more than Pres. Monson. 

 

And perhaps more than a few non-Catholics follow the Pope, too.

Edited September 17, 2015 by Stargazer

[Stargazer]

'Coz Google and Wikipedia are anti Mormon.

Ummm, not really. In the first place, Google only responds to linkage and visitation. Google is an indicator, generally.

Wikipedia has a very diverse editorship, and for LDS-related topics there are to be sure anti-Mormons who would try to put the Church into as bad a light as they could, except that there are others, both LDS and non-LDS, who labor to make sure articles stay as neutral and as encyclopedic in tone as possible.

[Stargazer]

Hopefully the rest are sensible enough to realize that Twitter is a complete waste of bandwidth

Spoken like a true Luddite!

Given that there are revolutions that have been fueled and abetted by Twitter, I'd have to say that your claim here is false. Maybe you don't care about Twitter, and who tweets, and what they tweet, but I found it to be darned useful. For example, I follow a number of USGS twitter feeds so I can know when important earthquakes hit. And when there are tsunami warnings. I see for example a tweet at 12:22 pm PDT by @NWS_NTWC (Northwest Tsunami Warning Center) that the warning due to the Chilean quake has been cancelled. Since I live near the coast this is valuable information to me. Sure there are people who tweet completely useless stuff. But then again there are people in this forum who post completely useless stuff.

[Stargazer]

Amen.

 

I'm reasonably familiar with online tech, but have never bothered to get a Twitter account, a Pinterest account, etc.

 

I guess that somehow means I and millions of others must be slacking...

I have two or three Twitter accounts (each for different purposes), but while I do have a Pinterest account, I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with it, and I'm really not so sure what it's for. I also have a few other social media accounts (besides Facebook), but I don't know what they are for, either.

[EmmaG]

Ummm, not really. In the first place, Google only responds to linkage and visitation. Google is an indicator, generally.Wikipedia has a very diverse editorship, and for LDS-related topics there are to be sure anti-Mormons who would try to put the Church into as bad a light as they could, except that there are others, both LDS and non-LDS, who labor to make sure articles stay as neutral and as encyclopedic in tone as possible.

People, I was being flippant!! Come on... I am well aware of what Google and Wikipedia are about. My comment was tongue in cheek. I'm glad to see that none of you regard them as anti Mormon. But tell your average true believing Mormon you are learning about Mormonism through information on the Internet - not directly from 'church approved' sources and you'd be branded as having been looking at anti Mormon lit (through the medium of Google).

Sorry, I'm new here. Carry on! Interesting thread...

[Calm]

When you get the ability to edit, you should go back and insert a smilie.

[Russell C McGregor]

Hi. Overall, yes. But what is interesting is that for all the major faiths, interest in the more stringent forms of the religion are increasing everywhere. Example, there's a lot of talk about the decline of interest in Catholic Vocations. Well, yes and no. The largest body of Nuns (i forget their name), something like 30,000 members, has an average age well  over 60. Very few young woman are signing on with them. Many of the orders among them are fairly relaxed with regard to clothing and religious practice.

 

On the other hand, there is a smaller organization of about 3000 which is centered, i believe, in Nashville. Very stringent in terms of holding its members to traditional dress/habit, observing the rituals et al. Their average age is about 35 and going down while the members' numbers are going up. Can't CFR You but it was on NPR a couple of years ago.

 

Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism hold the big numbers for the 6 million Jews in the US. BUT...they make few babies and have terrible rates of intermarriage with the children being raised in the other faith.

Or no faith at all.

Orthodox Jews in the US account for around 300000 to 500000...not so impressive number wise but they don't intermarry and they have big families. Yiddish speaking Hasidic Jews are at about 200000 and their popluation doubles every 15 years.

 

All of these people that i have mentioned tend to be highly educated.

 

With all the conjecturing about where religion might be headed, it's not unreasonable to suppose that we will see an intensification in traditional, hopefully benign, forms of religion into the future while the relaxed variety get shrugged off by people who see no advantage to one nice set of principles over another.

I wouldn't be surprised to see you proved right. Exogamy does nothing to preserve a community. Endogamic communities survive troubled times, and prosper when conditions are more favourable.

Now here's my prediction: look for subtle and not-so-subtle insinuations of "discrimination" and "prejudice" to be levelled at endogamic communities in the not-too-distant future.

[Robert F. Smith]

Honestly, I wouldn't pay much attention to Robert. ..................................

.........................................

I wouldn't either.

 

I would like to know what caused the spikes in searches for "Joseph Smith" on January 17, 2012 and November 8, 2012.  I don't recall anything like the Church essays or something similar being published that would have sparked interest.

This took place in the midst of the so-called "Mormon Moment," so aside from the Mitt Romney campaign ups and downs in 2012, you might want to have a look at the unusual Pew Research Center study of Mormons released on Jan 12, and a good Mormon joke told by David Letterman a few days before.

http://prophetjosephsmith.org/date/2012/01/page/2 .

 

They were still counting votes on Nov 8, 2012, so that might have brought Mitt's Mormonism into the news.  The problem with this sort of random thing is that history is oscillatory and unpredictable, and that most cycles are not so short that relatively few data points really mean anything.  We need a better research design than canard has given us.  We need to see whether other sets of data falsify or confirm what he thinks he is seeing.  Especially over the long term. 

Edited September 18, 2015 by Robert F. Smith

[Scott Lloyd]

I attended a fascinating meeting at work yesterday. I work for a market research company and one of our R&D teams has been looking at the relationships between online search compared to attitudes collected via consumer survey and also compared to sales. It was done on lots of different categories and countries.

 

A couple of interesting nuggets that came out of it:

 

• Search volume was a much better indication of interest than traffic to specific website (e.g. corporate website).
• Two of the best sources of search volume are Google and Wikipedia. The long term trend in interest in a topic on these two specifically are among the best indicators of interest and potential customers.
• Online interest is a good surrogate to represent all interest (online and offline)
• Social mentions data has a less direct correlation with sales but is still a useful indicator of long term interest
• Social mentions alone is rarely a driver of interest. Getting more people to just talk about a topic/brand/organisation on social media rarely drives wider interest in that brand/organisation. Instead, social mentions data (e.g. on Twitter/Facebook) is better used as a reflection of what the wider conversations are about (the water coolers, the café conversations that we can't listen in on)
• Spikes in search/social data are driven by events but are rarely beneficial in the long term. A big news story might see a big jump in interest, but it rarely lasts long and will decline very quickly after the 'event' is out of the news.

After the meeting I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of Mormon-related trends.

 

Google and Wikipedia data (volume of interest in 'Mormons' and 'Joseph Smith'):

• Long term decline in interest. Fewer people are interested in Mormonism today than they were in the past.
• Obvious 'event related' interest during the Romney campaign but went away after the campaign and the base interest continued to decline
• A few Joseph Smith news events generated a spike (the news about 40 wives after the essay was released caused the biggest spike in interest), but a long term decline if you only look at the base-level interest

Sources:

http://www.wikipediatrends.com/?query[]=Joseph%20Smith&query[]=Mormons

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=joseph%20smith%2C%20mormons&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1

 

(Turn on 'Norm' on the Wikipedia option if you want to benchmark vs Wikipedia overall traffic)

 

Thoughts?

Haven't read through this thread yet, but I wonder how much, if any, of the above could be attributed to the public by-and-large finding out that Mormonism is not as bizarre or reprehensible as they once thought it was, so now they are moving on to some other subject to satisfy their appetite for the sensational.

 

Not saying this is or is not the case. Just wondering aloud (or rather, in writing).

[carbon dioxide]

I admit of the 15 million worldwide members, only about 5 million actually show up for sacrament meetings. Those numbers aren't good.

The numbers are good for those that show up.  Since our salvation and exaltation is not dependent on converting the whole world, there is no need to worry. 

[Teancum]

It seems unreasonable to me that so many of have the expectation that everyone is going to want to join the Church.  It has always been the case that a large majority who show initial interest will never join.  There is no promise that Church membership will be a significant fraction of the world population before the Millennium kicks in.  It is irrational to expect otherwise.  It has been made clear that the Elect of God will be small in numbers.

 

I don't work for any kind of media company (just a humble computer programmer), but there are people who are kicking up a large amount of interest -- in some sectors -- just using social media, especially Twitter.  I am a Twitter follower to several Republican presidential candidates, and they are tweeting all the time.  This is how interest is generated!  But the Church doesn't seem to be using this medium to any decent extent, with the possible exception of the Church's own "official" Twitter account, which has tweeted over 7,000 times since 2008.  @LDSChurch.  256,000 people follow this account.

 

In fact, you can follow such luminaries as Thomas Monson on Twitter.  The following are "official" LDS Church Twitter accounts:

• Thomas S. Monson @ThomasSMonson - has tweeted 96 times (so far). Has 112,000 followers
• Dieter Uchtdorf - @UchtdorfDF - has tweeted 23 times.  Has 82,100 followers.
• Henry B. Eyring - @EyringHB - has tweeted 6 times.  Has 19,800 followers. 

The First Presidency apparently all signed up for Twitter accounts in May 2013.  They clearly are not using the medium to any rich extent. 

 

Other General Authorities have Twitter accounts.  Some members of the 12 have "official" Twitter accounts.  Maybe they all do, but Pres. Monson is the Tweet Leader, so following any of them isn't very productive.

 

There are "unofficial" Twitter accounts as well.  There is @ThomasMonsonQuotes, which is apparently a private person who Tweets with quotes from Pres. Monson.  This account has been around since December 2011 and has tweeted 501 times.  A similar "Quotes" account exists for other General Authorities.

 

NOW, look at Jen Foehner Wells (@Jenthulhu), a young science fiction author I have recently ran across.  She has self-published her first novel, Fluency, which would normally result in up to 200 sales and then ignominy.  However, she has been using Twitter and other social media with great abandon, and has gotten great results -- tens of thousands of copies sold.  She has been on Twitter since November 2011, and has tweeted 57,000 times!  She tweets herself, she retweets other tweets of interest, she favorites tweets, and she has almost 25,000 followers.  I had to take her off instant notification because my phone was beeping her tweets arrivals several times a day.  And they were usually pretty interesting things she was saying, or referring to, not just "I had oatmeal for breakfast".

 

I do believe that the Church needs to get smokin' with social media -- that's what God invented Twitter for, after all.  Everyone should be following President Monson on Twitter, and retweeting him to their own followers.  Or at least that would make sense if President Monson would get "religion" about Twitter.  All he needs to do is send out one relevant tweet per day -- and not just some scripture or self-quote, either.  He should be sending out congratulations to world leaders for doing the right thing, expressing encouragement for positive things going on in the world, giving sympathy for negative events.  And using hash-tags that are relevant for trending topics! 

 

Well, those are MY thoughts.

God invented Twitter for the church to use? Looks like he forgot to tell his Prophet.

[Stargazer]

God invented Twitter for the church to use? Looks like he forgot to tell his Prophet.

 

Yes, and that's a very disturbing case of oversight. When the Pope uses Twitter more effectively... what's the world coming to?

 

Actually, I use the phrase "God invented [item]" as a general meme.  I wouldn't read too much into it, Teancum.

[canard78]

Haven't read through this thread yet, but I wonder how much, if any, of the above could be attributed to the public by-and-large finding out that Mormonism is not as bizarre or reprehensible as they once thought it was, so now they are moving on to some other subject to satisfy their appetite for the sensational.

Not saying this is or is not the case. Just wondering aloud (or rather, in writing).

I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. It could be the search for the sensational or a more simple attitude like: "I know all I'm ever going to want to know about that and am not going to "ask the Internet" again."

[canard78]

I wouldn't either.

This took place in the midst of the so-called "Mormon Moment," so aside from the Mitt Romney campaign ups and downs in 2012, you might want to have a look at the unusual Pew Research Center study of Mormons released on Jan 12, and a good Mormon joke told by David Letterman a few days before.

http://prophetjosephsmith.org/date/2012/01/page/2 .

Awww... I thought it was going to be a link to the joke.

They were still counting votes on Nov 8, 2012, so that might have brought Mitt's Mormonism into the news. The problem with this sort of random thing is that history is oscillatory and unpredictable, and that most cycles are not so short that relatively few data points really mean anything. We need a better research design than canard has given us. We need to see whether other sets of data falsify or confirm what he thinks he is seeing. Especially over the long term.

But that's exactly the point I'm making Robert. Don't look at the spike that are responding to big events. Look at the trend between the spikes.

If you'd like to present us with your alternative data set that shows interest in Mormonism is growing, not declining, please feel free. Like I said at the top of this thread: search and social data is a good surrogate for wider (offline) interest and engagement with a topic. We know this because we've got access at our agency to both online and broader offline data sources for the same topic, brand or organisation.

Until you provide some actual evidence you're only stating your opinion.

[canard78]

This one's good. Guess what those blips are every six months

http://www.wikipediatrends.com/Thomas_S._Monson.html

"General Conference - The Heartbeat of the Church"

That's a great example of event spikes (or seasonality, given the regularity and predictability).

Again, to understand how much interest there is in President Monson outside of the events you can model that out and look at the underlying trend.

[hagoth7]

...Since our salvation and exaltation is not dependent on converting the whole world, there is no need to worry. 

?

!!

[Robert F. Smith]

...................................................................  

But that's exactly the point I'm making Robert. Don't look at the spike that are responding to big events. Look at the trend between the spikes.

If you'd like to present us with your alternative data set that shows interest in Mormonism is growing, not declining, please feel free. Like I said at the top of this thread: search and social data is a good surrogate for wider (offline) interest and engagement with a topic. We know this because we've got access at our agency to both online and broader offline data sources for the same topic, brand or organisation.

Until you provide some actual evidence you're only stating your opinion.

You are the one making the short term, unverified assertions about the trends.  I couldn't care less whether the interest in Mormonism is growing or waning.  You have yet to deal with my primary points: 

 

The problem with this sort of random thing is that history is oscillatory and unpredictable, and that most cycles are not so short that relatively few data points really mean anything. We need a better research design than canard has given us. We need to see whether other sets of data falsify or confirm what he thinks he is seeing. Especially over the long term.

 

 You may happily go your way without further consideration, but I am thinking of climate trends, sunspot cycles, economic cycles, etc., none of which tell us anything over such short periods as you have displayed for us.

 

Here, for example, are serious studies of the sort I would like to see: http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/ .