Religiosity
The Oxford English Dictionary defines religiosity as: "Religiousness; religious feeling or belief. [...] Affected or excessive religiousness". Different scholars have seen this concept as broadly about religious orientations and degrees of involvement or commitment. Religiosity is measured at the levels of individuals or groups and there is a lack of agreement on what criteria would constitute religiosity among scholars. Sociologists of religion have observed that an individual's experience, beliefs, sense of belonging, and behavior often are not congruent with their actual religious behavior, since there is much diversity in how one can be religious or not. Multiple problems exist in measuring religiosity. For instance, measures of variables such as church attendance produce different results when different methods are used - such as traditional surveys vs time-use surveys. Measuring religion Inaccuracy of polling and identification The reliability of any poll results, in general and specifically on religion, can be questioned due numerous factors such as: there have been very low response rates for polls since the 1990s polls consistently fail to predict government election outcomes, which signifies that polls in general do not capture the actual views of the population biases in wording or topic affect how people respond to polls polls categorize people based on limited choices polls often generalize broadly polls have shallow or superficial choices, which complicate expressing their complex religious beliefs and practices interviewer and respondent fatigue is very common The measurement of religiosity is hampered by the difficulties involved in defining what is meant by the term and the variables it entails. Numerous studies have explored the different components of religiosity, with most finding some distinction between religious beliefs/doctrine, religious practice, and spirituality. When religiosity is measured, it is important to specify which aspects of religiosity are referred to. Researchers also note that an estimated 20-40% of the population changes their self-reported religious affiliation/identity over time due to numerous factors and that usually it is their answers on surveys that change, not necessarily their religious practices or beliefs. In general, polling numbers should not be taken at face value since the way people answer questions differs in meaning in context by different cultures and is, thus, misleading to assume that answering a poll questions has a simple interpretation. According to Gallup there are variations on the responses based on how they ask questions. They routinely ask on complex things like belief in God since the early 2000s in 3 different wordings and they constantly receive 3 different percentages in responses. Surveys in the United States Two major surveys in the United States (General Social Survey and Cooperative Congressional Election Study) consistently have discrepancies between their demographic estimates that amount to 8% and growing. This is due to a few factors such as each one asking questions differently and, thus, impacting how respondents answer their questions due "social desirability bias"; the lumping of very different groups (atheist, agnostics, nothing in particular) into singular categories (e.g. "no religion" vs "nothing in particular"); and imbalance of representative respondents (e.g.