How "Online" Are Mormons And Mormon Types?
More Typology Exploration + Cooperative Election Study data
What a week/month… From the death of President Russel M. Nelson, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to the Michigan shooting. I hope we can all take a little time to unplug and get some fresh air. My heart goes out to those closely affected by one or more of these events. I am hoping for a better October.
Today I wanted to dive more into the Mormon Types specifically examining online presence. If you want more info on my Mormon classification types, read more here.
Are devout Mormons more online? or are less devout more online? Well, turns out its not quite a simple answer. The Cultural Mormons and In-Betweeners are more online, yet more devout Mormons are still politically engaged online.
Let’s look at some charts
How Do Mormons Compare to Other Religions?
As you might be able to see in this break, frequent internet use is correlated with party identification. More liberal groups are more likely to be online than more conservative groups on average. This actually creates a problem in survey research where online panels struggle getting rural conservatives on panels while having plenty of news-engaged online liberals. Mormons, as you can see above, are less likely to use the internet almost constantly compared to many other religious groups.
What about devout Mormons and other Mormons?
There is a direct negative correlation with religious practice and being online “almost constantly.” Our data suggests more devout groups (adaptive and devout traditionalists) are less likely to report spending time online than the In-Betweeners and Cultural Mormons.
Interestingly, the see the opposite trend when looking at political engagement (reported voter registration in this case). The more devout groups are more likely to report being registered to vote.
Now let’s compare notes with a different dataset from the CES and replicate our “Devout” group like we have the past few posts.
Unfortunately, the CES only has a question on daily social media use where we would want more granular data to see our gap we see above which separates the “a several times a day” people from the “almost constantly” people.
However, we do see the same pattern devout pattern when looking at political engagement.
Similarly, our data suggests that Devout Mormons are more politically interested than other types of Mormons.
Below, the Cooperative Election Study asks about different social media actions people take.
These are not statistically significant differences. I hypothesize this is because all these questions ask about social media use in relation to politics. If it just asked about politic interest/action, we may see Devout Mormons higher and if we just asked about social media we may see Other Mormons higher. But, we ask about both together which may cancel out the differences.
Conclusion
For my future posts (and this one), I am going to try and give you a so-what sentence after each post summing the take-away.
So the so what?
The data suggests less devout Mormons are more online generally, but this relationship is moderated when engaging online politically.
Let me know what you below and see you next week!
Code for this post is available here.