Showing all posts in Statistics

In LGBT Issues, Statistics

How often do BYU student speakers at commencement suggest they’re straight?

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

Like many other people, I was dismayed to read Elder Holland’s recent speech at BYU where he advocated the use of metaphorical muskets to fire at people who he sees as not sufficiently faithful to the Church’s anti-LGBT stance. He seemed very concerned about a slippery slope that starts with a student expressing the idea (approved by powers that be in the administration!) that they were gay and also loved by God that might lead to . . . it’s unclear exactly what. Maybe a student would say they’re single and also loved by God, or trans and also loved by God. I can’t really get Elder Holland’s concern here, since the people approving the speeches work for the Q15, so if he doesn’t like that they approved it, he should maybe call an internal meeting over it rather than wringing his hands about it in public. Anyway, at the same time that he’s deeply concerned with this slippery slope, Elder Holland seems totally unconcerned with another slippery slope that he starts by bringing up the metaphor of using muskets to shoot at people who aren’t straight-friendly enough. This slippery slope starts with discussion of metaphorical musket fire and moves to discussion of real musket fire (helpfully already supplied by DezNat folks and their friends) and ends with physical violence against LGBT people. I think this should be a much bigger concern, but clearly Elder Holland doesn’t agree. I don’t even want to know how much he sympathizes with DezNat. I was clearly wrong when I placed him as “lean progressive” on my Q15 spectrum just a couple of months ago.

Photo by Daniel Sandvik on Unsplash

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In General Conference, Statistics

General Conference Talks by Speaker Position Since 1960

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

How many women will speak in General Conference now that the Church has announced that it’s discontinuing Saturday night gender-specific sessions? This was the major question I asked in my post last week on this change. I worry that we’ll go back to just having two women speak per Conference, the norm for the last several years when you ignore gender-specific sessions. Some commenters on the post were more optimistic that there would be more, though.

I was wondering about which other group of speakers (i.e., holders of what position–Seventies, Q12, or whatever) might have their speaking opportunities reduced to make space for more women speaking. I thought it could be helpful to look back at recent history, to see how many speaking slots the different positions have been allocated. I went back to 1960, because that turned out to be a good compromise between getting a good amount of data and me running out of energy.

Of course the total number of talks per Conference isn’t constant. This graph shows the average number of talks per Conference each year. I’m showing the average each year instead of showing the talk counts Conference by Conference because there’s often a lot of up-and-down noise between April and October (for reasons like the statistical and auditing reports only occurring in April) that makes the trend across time harder to look at. Averaging each year smooths those little ups and downs out, although you can see there’s still plenty of year-to-year variation.

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In General Conference, Statistics

Quotes of Current Church President in Conference, April 2011 vs. April 2021

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

Since President Nelson assumed office, I’ve read a number of discussions of how he seems to get quoted a lot in General Conference, even in comparison with previous Church Presidents. For example, it’s mentions of his name rather than quotes, but TheFingerLakesBandit posted a graph (presumably based on Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks data) on the Mormon Subreddit a few months ago that showed that President Nelson’s name has a much bigger spike than any other newly-called Church President since World War II or so. And this certainly matches my own experience: I feel like he’s quoted a ton.

When I was working on my Conference review post last month, I decided to note all the sources quoted so I could do a little comparison. I chose to compare this last Conference against April 2011. I chose it as a comparison point not because it was a decade ago, but because at that point, Thomas S. Monson had been Church President for about as long as Russell M. Nelson has been now (it was the seventh Conference as President for each of them).

For each quote in each talk, I noted the following:

  • The speaker’s name and position
  • The source of the quote
  • The length of the quote in words

Of course there are many different sources quoted in Conference. The majority are from scriptures, but there are also lots of other Mormon and even occasionally non-Mormon sources. To make the data easier to look at, I sorted the quotes into the following categories by type of source:

  • Deity (scriptures that are in the words of Jesus)
  • Ancient prophet (most non-deity scriptures)
  • Latter-day prophet (including some D&C verses in Joseph Smith’s voice instead of Jesus’s)
  • Latter-day GA
  • Current prophet
  • Current GA
  • Other Mormon
  • Other non-Mormon (including occasional bits of scripture like Pharisees interrogating Jesus)

I excluded three types of quotes entirely:

  • Sometimes a speaker quotes a source and then uses a phrase from that source repeatedly throughout their talk. For example, in her 2011 talk, Mary N. Cook quoted the song “Kindness Begins with Me.” Then, throughout the talk, she repeated the phrase “remember this: kindness begins with me” several more times (and once just “kindness begins with me”). I counted the first quote, but excluded the others.
  • Sometimes a speaker quotes someone in the context of telling a story rather than because they’ve said a wise thing. When a quote was just used for the story, I excluded it, because I wanted to count only cases where someone is quoted for their wisdom. For example, in this 2011 talk, Quentin L. Cook told the story you might remember about a teen girl’s purse that was left at a dance, and how the people who found it inferred what kind of person she was based on its contents. In telling the story, he quoted from the stake YW President talking about the contents of the purse. I didn’t include this quote.
  • Following the same principle as the previous point, if a speaker quoted something they thought listeners might be saying or thinking, I didn’t count that. For example, also in a 2011 talk, Dieter F. Uchtdorf supposed that people might be texting each other about his talk and saying “He’s been speaking for 10 minutes and still no aviation analogy!” As this wasn’t included in the talk because it shares a bit of wisdom, I excluded it.

The biggest difference between the two Conferences is that April 2011 had an extra session (General Young Women) because it was before women’s meetings were moved to Conference weekend and alternated with General Priesthood meeting. The number of talks was similar, though (37 in 2011, 35 in 2021), because the 2021 talks were generally shorter (an average of 1560 words versus 1820 in 2011). A similar fraction of the total words in talks were quotes, 15% in 2011 and 16% in 2021. Because of this, I did all the analyses below by looking at quotes of a particular source as a fraction of total quotes, rather than as a a fraction of total words. Also, to take into account different length of quotes, I used words in quotes as the unit of analysis (for example, counting a 20-word quote for twice as much as a 10-word quote) rather than individual quotes.

This first graph shows the percentage of quoted words coming from each of the eight source types, comparing April 2011 against April 2021. For example, the leftmost blue bar says that about 33% of words in quotes in April 2011 Conference were quotes of deity.

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In GA's, Statistics

What age would each Q15 member need to reach to become Church President?

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

Note: In the original version of this post, I had Elders Gong and Soares out of order at the bottom of the graph. Thanks to Jim, who commented on the previous post to point out the problem, I’ve now fixed it.

While I was working on my last post about each Q15 member’s probability of becoming Church President, I realized that I could look at the question a different way. Rather than calculating probability, I could work out how long each member would have to live in order to outlive everyone senior to him. For those much younger than those senior to them, this will be a relatively young age; for those close in age or perhaps even older than those senior to them, this will be a greater age. I know probability answers the question of who’s likely to make the top spot more directly, but I like the vividness of the how long would he have to live question.

Using the same method I used in the last post (see the Method section below for details), I calculated the life expectancy for each current Q15 member from the SOA mortality table I’ve been using. Then it was straightforward to also find, for each member, the longest remaining life expectancy of any other member senior to him, and from that, the age he would have to reach to become Church President.

I thought it would also be fun to look at needed life expectancy to become Church President for past Q15 members. This is even easier to calculate, as everyone’s lifespan is already known, so there are no life expectancy calculations required. For each member, I just noted the latest death date of anyone senior to him, and subtracted the member’s birthday to get the age he needed to reach to become Church President.

The graph below shows life expectancy needed to reach the presidency for all Q15 members back to Heber J. Grant. It’s a little busy, so let me walk you through what’s in it.

  • Fatter bars with lighter shading show needed life expectancy to become Church President.
  • Skinnier bars with darker shading show actual lifespan (or current age for living members).
  • Outlined white bars tacked on the skinny bars for living members show remaining life expectancy.
  • Gray and black bars give actual, known values.
  • Blue bars are based on at least some life expectancy estimation.
  • Note that the graph cuts off the ages 0 to 20 to focus better on the ages where there are differences.

 

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In GA's, Statistics

Church President Probabilities, Adjusted for Q15 Parents’ Lifespan

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

Note: As Jim pointed out in the comments, I mixed up the ordering of the two most junior Q15 members, Elders Gong and Soares. I clearly need to work on my quality control. 🙂 In any case, as it was straightforward to do, I’ve corrected the yearly probabilities graph below. Because it would require more work, I haven’t fixed the remainder of the post with all the parent lifespan-adjusted probabilities. They’re still mostly correct; just ignore the lines for Elders Gong and Soares.

I’ve blogged a number of times about probabilities of Q15 members becoming Church President (see the bottom of this post for links). I’ve always used a pretty similar method to get probabilities: use a single mortality table for all members, simulate their predicted lifespans a bunch of times by drawing random numbers and comparing them to the mortality table, and then check what the implication is in each simulation for who gets to be Church President and for how long.

A suggestion that commenters have sometimes made is that I could adjust the expected lifespans of each Q15 member based on how long his parents lived, as surely longevity is at least partly heritable. In this post, I’ll show results from my attempt to make just such an adjustment. I’ve got to warn you, though: this is based on kind of seat-of-the-pants reasoning, and I’ll understand if you don’t buy the assumptions I made. See the Method section below if you want the details.

First, though, here’s an up-to-date version of the yearly probability of being President graph that I’ve also shown in a few previous posts. This doesn’t include the adjustments based on parent lifespan that I’ll talk about below. I just take the yearly mortality probabilities for each Q15 member, given their age, from the Society of Actuaries’ RP-2014 table (specifically, white collar males, employee up until age 80, and healthy annuitant after that), and for each member, his probability of being Church President in a year is his probability of surviving to that year times the probability that all the men senior to him have died by that year.

 

As has been the case since I first looked at this question over a decade ago, it’s President Oaks, Elder Holland, and Elder Bednar who look like the best bets to become Church President. Elders Uchtdorf, Andersen, Stevenson, and Soares might have a shot. The remainder are less likely.

However, keep in mind that the biggest weakness of this analysis is that a mortality table describes the lifespan of large groups of people, and works less well for small groups or individuals. If you’re placing bets on who in the Q15 might become Church President, sure, Elder Bednar is probably a better bet than Elder Cook. But in a tiny sample like 15 men, all kinds of things could happen. Elder Bednar might contract an incurable illness tomorrow. Elder Cook might live to be 110.

President Nelson is a great illustration of how big errors can get. In my first post on the topic, back in 2009, my custom mortality table gave him only a 23% chance of becoming Church President, and an estimated 2.4 years in the position if he did make it. He’s obviously made it to the top spot now, and he’s been in for over three years and seems to be going strong. Of course a 23% chance isn’t really that close to zero, but for sure if I had placed bets in 2009, I wouldn’t have predicted Elder Nelson would ever become President Nelson. So the method can make mistakes, big ones. But of course that doesn’t stop me from using it. I can hardly contain myself, as it’s just so darned entertaining to speculate and guess, and to cloak my guesses in at least a veneer of reasonableness.

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In Statistics, Temple

Temple Ratings on Google Maps, Part 1

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

I read a mention somewhere recently of the fact that you can rate and review LDS temples on Google Maps just like you’d rate or review a restaurant or bookstore. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at this rating data, just to see what’s there. For each of the 168 temples that has been dedicated, I noted the following:

  • Number of ratings of each possible number of stars (1-5) — note that all that’s shown by Google Maps is a little chart, but if you poke into the HTML, you can find the actual counts of ratings
  • Top words from the reviews and how often they were used — Google Maps helpfully compiles these
  • Year the temple was dedicated — from Church website
  • Location of the temple, which I aggregated into the following regions: Utah, West US (excluding Utah, divided at Mississippi River), East US, Canada & Alaska, Mexico & Central America & Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia/Pacific (including Hawaii)

I also browsed through some of the reviews, and copied snippets that I found funny or interesting. I’ll share those in an upcoming post.

Average ratings

To start, the most interesting question to me is which temple is rated highest. Unfortunately, although I can give you an answer, there’s just hardly any variability to speak of. On the 5-star scale, temples’ ratings range from Tokyo Japan at the low end with 4.48 up to Detroit Michigan at the high end with 4.97. Really, across temples, it’s just a bunch of ratings of five stars, with only the occasional four or lower. And in retrospect, this probably isn’t all that surprising, as it’s overwhelmingly going to be Mormons rating the temples, and they’re overwhelmingly going to give five stars. There are definitely non- or ex- or anti-Mormons rating temples, and sometimes giving lower ratings to show their displeasure, but compared to ratings by Mormons who love to see the temple, they are few and far between.

So instead of looking at average rating for each temple, I went back and looked just at the percentage of ratings that were five stars. Looked at this way, the data has a little more variability. The lowest value is 75.3% for Suva Fiji, and the highest is 98.2% for Palmyra New York. It doesn’t look like there are any real differences by dedication year, but there might be by region. Here’s a graph. I’ve ordered the regions by highest to lowest average.

It’s interesting that the US regions have the highest averages, followed by the other Americas regions, followed by the rest of the world. I did two statistical tests (t-tests, two tailed) to compare the groups of regions, one comparing US versus other Americas and the other comparing other Americas versus the rest of the world. Both were statistically significant (p < .001). This means it’s unlikely that we would see differences this big between the groups if the underlying populations actually had the same average percentage of five-star ratings.

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In Statistics

Fighting in the Comments at the Church Newsroom

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

Before I read all the contentious comments on the Church Newsroom group post that congratulated Biden and Harris for winning the US Presidential election, I was only vaguely aware of the Church Newsroom Facebook presence. Sure, as a Mormon with lots of Mormon Facebook friends, I’ve seen people link to it now and again, but I don’t know that I had ever clicked through to it more than once or twice. And I certainly had no idea that it was the site of such epic comment wars. If you had asked me, I would have guessed that all the comments would be blandly supportive, kind of like letters to the editor in the Ensign. Now that I’ve noticed it, though, it seems like the comment wars keep coming back. A bunch of fighting broke out again on January 15th when the Q15 (finally) condemned the attempted coup by Trump supporters the previous Wednesday. Comments were quickly closed, as they also had been eventually on the Biden/Harris post. But then just a few days later, a bunch of GAs had the gall to get vaccinated against COVID, and the fighting broke out all over again. (You can see my satire of some of the positions commenters took in my most recent post.)

Seeing all these fights in such a short period of time made me wonder a few things about the Church Newsroom group. Has it always been this full of conflict? Was there ever a time when it was full of nothing but people praising the Church’s news releases? If so, what changed? Was it the rise of Trump that got people in a more argumentative mood? Was it the COVID pandemic? Or maybe was it a change in the Newsroom staff’s moderation strategy, where they were once more hands-on and then moved to being more hands-off?

To make an attempt at answering these questions, I read back through all the old Church Newsroom Facebook group posts I could find. Unfortunately, I discovered that they only go back to August of 2019. Prior to that, it looks like the Newsroom’s Facebook presence was a page rather than a group, and it was at the URL www.facebook.com/MormonNewsroom (redirects from www.facebook.com/LDSNewsroom, the redirect still works even though the page is gone). You can still see it mentioned, for example, in this 2011 Newsroom article on the Church’s social media presence. I’ve looked at some snapshots of the old page using the WayBack Machine, and it’s clear that there were comments on the posts, but the snapshots aren’t anything like frequent or complete enough for me to reconstruct anything.

So without being able to go back before 2016, my question about Trump being a trigger for the fighting was off the table, but at least I could still look at the beginning of COVID. From August 2019 to January 2021, I found 453 Newsroom posts. (It’s possible that I missed a few; I fought with Facebook’s determined desire to show me what it thought I’d find most interesting rather than just listing posts chronologically.) I didn’t want to take the time to read all the comments on all the posts, so for each post, I just noted the following:

  • Date
  • Topic of the post
  • Total number of comments
  • Number of top-level comments (i.e., that are not replies to a comment)
  • Number of subthreads (strings of comments following a top-level comment) that featured fighting
  • When there was fighting, brief notes about what it was about

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In Politics, Statistics

I read 2200 comments on the Church Newsroom post so you don’t have to.

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Two weeks ago, the US Electoral College voted Joe Biden in as the next US President. The same day, the Church released a boilerplate statement congratulating Biden and Kamala Harris on their win, thanking Trump and Pence for their service, and asking members to pray for all of them. The statement was then linked in the Church’s public Newsroom group on Facebook. Commenters there proceeded to hold a heated debate that ran to 2200 comments before the Church’s public affairs people (I’m assuming) shut it down.

They didn’t delete the comments that were already up, though, so I thought it would be a fun project to read through them and look for patterns like most commonly raised issues. To be complete, I should note that some of the comments clearly had been deleted, as there were only 1882 remaining when I read them (starting about a week ago). However, given how many pretty unhinged comments still remain up, I doubt that it was the Church PA people deleting them. Rather, it seems more likely that people who had made comments went back and deleted them.

Here’s the data I noted for each of the comments:

  • Name of the person making it. I noted this so I could see if it was a few people making a ton of comments, or a lot of people making a few.
  • Lean of the comment (Biden – strong, Biden – weak, neutral, Trump – weak, or Trump – strong). Of course this is subjective but it’s pretty clear most of the time.
  • Issues raised, which I sorted into a few dozen categories.
  • Number of words.
  • Comment being replied to, so I could see which comments drew the most replies.
  • Number of reactions: Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry

For the 103 people who made five or more comments, I also noted the following:

  • Overall lean of their comments. This was straightforward, as people pretty much always showed a consistent lean from one comment to another.
  • Total number of comments.
  • Gender. Most people declare their gender in their profile.
  • Age category (younger, middle aged, older). As most people don’t give their age on Facebook, I guessed based on graduation and marriage dates and apparent ages of children or grandchildren. I was thinking of the age groups as being approximately < 40 for younger, 40 – 64 for middle aged, and 65+ for older. Of the 103 people, I assigned age categories to 92 of them.

Comment Lean

As the graph below shows, Trump-leaning comments outnumbered Biden-leaning ones by nearly a 2:1 ratio. There were also nearly as many neutral comments as Biden-leaning ones.

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In Statistics

Q15 Members Giving Thanks

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

On the Friday before (US) Thanksgiving, President Nelson suggested that people share messages of gratitude on social media in the next week, using the hashtag #GiveThanks. I saw a friend of a friend on Facebook point out that the other members of the Q15 weren’t all equally diligent in responding to his call. As of a couple of days before Thanksgiving, a few had not posted with the hashtag even once. I thought this was a really interesting point. The Q15 members’ response might be thought of as a little case study in how important they find it to publicly show that they’re following the prophet.

This graph shows the number of Facebook posts each member of the Q15 wrote during the week prior to Thanksgiving plus one day afterward (because a couple of them also posted on that day using the hashtag). For comparison, I also checked how often they posted during the same time period in 2019. (Note that I didn’t count a post twice when the same post was written twice but just in different languages.)

President Nelson definitely got overall participation in pre-Thanksgiving posts up with his challenge. More interestingly, the Q15 members varied in how much they posted. Before I counted, I guessed that Elder Andersen would take the top spot, as he seems the most obsequious to me. I certainly wouldn’t have picked President Ballard and Elder Renlund as the top posters, although Elder Andersen was only one post behind.

Really, the differences among the Q15 members probably aren’t meaningful, with the possible exception of Elder Uchtdorf’s zero. It seems to me that he really made a statement by not responding even minimally to President Nelson’s suggestion. I mean, if he had just thrown one post up, he certainly wouldn’t have been alone. Five other Q15 members did no more than that. But Elder Uchtdorf didn’t even reach that level. He didn’t post around Thanksgiving in 2019, and he didn’t do it again in 2020.

I realize that this is very likely overinterpreting, but I wonder if he figured that President Nelson already demoted him out of the First Presidency, so he has no need to try to stay on his good side with public displays of loyalty, as he’s unlikely to be demoted (or promoted) again. Every other Q15 member is either already in the First Presidency or is a candidate, should one of President Nelson’s counselors pre-decease him.

What do you think Elder Uchtdorf’s refusal to hop to and answer President Nelson’s call means?

In Reviews, Statistics

Jana Riess’s The Next Mormons

Author ZiffPosted on

Of all the discussions I read on the Bloggernacle, probably my favorite are the ones where people share their experience with the church. I love to hear about people’s experience with YW activities or missions or weird Sunday School classes. Church policies and doctrines and history can be interesting too, but it’s really the contemporary on the ground experience that fascinates me the most. Given this, I’m really the perfect target audience for Jana Riess’s book The Next Mormons.

The book was published in early 2019, which I know feels like about a decade ago in coronavirus time, and I know I’m slow in getting around to comment on it, and that if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve already read it. But I’ll continue just in case you haven’t. The heart of the book is a survey of American Mormons that Riess and Benjamin Knoll designed and had carried out in late 2016. They got responses from over 1,100 current Mormons and over 500 former Mormons. They asked a ton of interesting questions that Riess reports results on in the book. For example, they asked about personal beliefs and worship and spiritual practices, serving missions, temple worship, and family size, as well as more controversial issues like women’s ordination, the priesthood/temple ban, and the November policy. The subtitle of the book is “How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” so her focus is clearly on generational differences. But she also reports all kinds of interesting breakdowns by variables like gender, race, and current vs. former Mormon. Read More

In Mormon Culture, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Movies on IMDB

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

After writing a silly post a few weeks ago with suggestions for movies the Church should make, I got to wondering how actual Mormon movies are rated on IMDB. I’m thinking here not just of Church-made movies, but of movies made about Mormons by non-Church studios, stuff like God’s Army or Saturday’s Warrior. I didn’t have any particular questions I wanted to answer with the data or any hypotheses to test. I just thought it might be interesting to look descriptively at what the ratings look like.

I got ratings from IMDB for a list of 75 Mormon movies. I made an initial list working from the following sources:

  • Movies I have personally seen or am aware of
  • Movies at least 30 minutes long on the Hard-to-Find Mormon Videos YouTube channel (which is for Church-produced movies only)
  • Movies appearing on the Wikipedia page on Mormon cinema
  • Movies Google suggested when I searched for “Mormon movies”
  • Movies appearing on some user-created lists of Mormon movies on IMDB

I dropped from the initial lists any movies that met any of these criteria:

  • Have fewer than 10 ratings on IMDB
  • Don’t prominently feature Mormons or Mormonism, unless the movie is made by the Church (e.g., Johnny Lingo is included even though it doesn’t mention church because it was made by BYU, but Napoleon Dynamite, which showed up on some of the searches and lists, is excluded)
  • Don’t take a positive view of Mormonism (This is an easy call for movies like The God Makers, but I also made some judgment calls based on descriptions and reviews I read on IMDB. For example, I used this rule to exclude the 1950 movie The Wagon Master, which has the protagonists guiding a group of Mormon pioneers, but it sounds like isn’t really a movie about Mormons, and the Mormons are more just neutral background.)

I grouped the 75 movies into four categories:

  • Church produced, scripture or Church history topic – 7 movies
  • Church produced, other topic – 6 movies
  • Not Church produced, scripture or Church history topic – 16 movies
  • Not Church produced, other topic – 46 movies

Ratings by Movie Category

One thought I had when looking at these ratings is that perhaps raters of Mormon movies, who I would expect to be largely Mormon themselves, might give these movies high ratings for reasons other than (or in addition to) thinking they were good. For example, giving Mormon movies high ratings might be seen as a kind of missionary work, because if you can inflate their ratings, maybe non-Mormons will be more likely to take notice and watch them and discover how great the Church is. I also thought these extra reasons might be more of a factor in rating movies that are closer to the core mission of the Church, so they would have the greatest effect for movies that are produced by the Church, or are about a scripture or Church history topic, or both.

This graph shows the average rating by category. Note that this is the average of movie averages, not the average of the individual ratings. I chose this to avoid having one movie count for more than another just because it received more ratings. I also wanted to use IMDB’s weighted average ratings, where they adjust the rating “in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it,” and these ratings are only available for movies as a whole, not for individual raters.

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In General Conference, Prayer, Statistics

General Conference prayer length

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

When I wrote a review of Conference back in April, I noticed that the prayers were noticeably longer in this Conference than last October’s. It got me to thinking that although I have an intuitive sense of what feels like a short or a long prayer, I don’t know what actually counts as a short or a long prayer in comparison with other prayers in Conference. I was also interested to know whether there has been any trend over time in prayer length. Like maybe a new Church President sent a memo to all prayer-givers to tell them to hustle things along in their prayers, so they suddenly got shorter. And of course now that we’ve had women praying in general sessions for several years, an obvious question is whether their prayers are similar in length to the men’s or shorter (or longer!) My guess was that they would be shorter, given that men are encouraged to take up more space in every other area of the Church.

To answer these questions, I watched a bunch of videos of the beginnings and ends of General Conference sessions and noted who was praying and timed the prayers. The videos came from the Church’s General Conference YouTube channel and to the General Conference page on the Church website. Although there are videos of individual talks going back to 1971, there are only full session videos going back to about 2005, with occasional sessions or parts of sessions available for another decade before that.

As an aside, I’m serious about saying “parts of sessions.” The Church’s YouTube channel videos of full sessions are good for recent Conferences, but as you go back, they have lots of errors. There are several videos that are labeled as full sessions, but they end after five or ten minutes. There are a few that are mislabeled, which I only realized when the introduction in the video itself said it was a different year than the labeling of the video did. There’s even one video that shows the same session twice, back-to-back. On the Church website itself, there are a lot of sessions that claim to have video (i.e., there is a link to watch) but then they can’t be played. And there’s also at least some mislabeling. Fortunately, in at least some cases, the audio-only recording works. I submitted feedback on the Church’s website, but I couldn’t find a way to do so on its YouTube Conference channel. I know this is an extremely long shot, but if you happen to know how I could reach whoever is running it, I would be happy to supply a list of issues that need to be fixed.

Okay, on to the data! I noted lengths for 381 prayers between 1996 and 2020. (You’d think I would have had an even number since each session has two prayers, but like I was complaining about above, a few of the videos include only the opening prayer.) The average length was 93 seconds. This is within the range I expected, and it’s also consistent with my sense of what constitutes a long prayer, as while watching all these prayers, I typically started to feel like they were dragging when they went over about 100 seconds. It’s just unfortunate that older session videos aren’t available too, because I recall Conference prayers in the 1980s when I was a kid sometimes going on what felt like forever. Looking back, though, I wonder if it wasn’t just my age and shorter attention span that made them feel extra long.

This graph shows average length across time.

Note that the dot for 1996 is just because there were no recordings available for 1997 or 1998. It looks like maybe prayers were longer in the Hinckley years than in the Monson years. Maybe.

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In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part III: Comparison between churches

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

How has interest in different churches changed during the coronavirus pandemic? This is a question that occurred to me while I was working on my last couple of posts where I looked at Google Trends data about the LDS Church in particular.

In this post, I’ve gathered Google Trends data on a bunch of different churches and I’ll show daily 2019 vs. 2020 comparisons for each one. I’m only making comparisons to Christian churches, and my list is pretty US-centric, both because I went with what I was most familiar with. Here’s the complete list, along with what Google Trends categorizes each as. Note that I went with what looked like a high-volume search term for each church or denomination, so for example for Methodists I chose the United Methodist Church, but for Baptists, which represents lots of different churches, even the biggest organizations (e.g., Southern Baptist Convention) had far lower volume, so I just went with “Baptists.” In addition to traditional denominations and fringe groups like us and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I included a couple of big megachurches because I understand they’ve been growing a lot relative to the old mainline denominations. I’ve ordered them as fringe groups first, followed by mainstream ones sort of from high (more ritual) to low (less ritual) (based on nothing more than my sense of them), with the megachurches at the end.

Church or belief (Google trends suggested term) Google trends category
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church
Jehovah’s Witnesses Denomination
Seventh-Day Adventist Church Denomination
Catholic Church Church
Eastern Orthodox Church Church
Episcopal Church United States (I guess to differentiate from Anglican churches in other countries?)
Lutheranism Church
Presbyterianism Church
United Methodist Church Denomination
Baptists Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
Pentecostalism Following
Lakewood Church Church in Houston, Texas
Saddleback Church Topic

As commenters on my first post pointed out, in the particular case of the LDS Church, there are reasons to doubt that this is that good a measure of interest in the Church. And what I found in my second post supported that, with far different results for a search term used by members of the Church versus by non-members. Given that difference, with all these other churches that I’m far less familiar with, who even knows what other complications I’m overlooking? There are probably a lot, but I think the data are fun to look at anyway if you just keep your truckload of salt handy.

Also, while I’m bringing up reasons to be leery of the Google Trends data, let me show you something about their scaling that makes me a little crazy. I noticed when I accidentally moved the end date of a time series one day forward or back that it changed the whole rest of the series, rather than just omitting the day in question. This suggests to me that the scaling to 100 that the help mentions isn’t all that Google Trends is doing. Rather, it’s aggregating a bunch of data and probably smoothing it together with some kind of model under the hood.

Here, let me show you what I’m talking about. The graph shows daily results for worldwide searches for “Mormon” from April 1 of this year through different ending days.

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In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part II: Members vs. non-members

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

I posted a few days ago about change in interest in church (in the LDS Church in particular) during the coronavirus. I used Google Trends data on searches for the Church. Commenters on the post (and on Facebook) made some excellent points about how differences might be attributable to change in interest from Mormons versus from non-Mormons. In this post, I’m going to make a quick attempt to tease that apart. (Commenters also raised other good critiques, such as that a change in Google Trends data might not reflect a difference in organic interest so much as a structural change in how church is happening during the pandemic, that are beyond the scope of what I will look at in this post.)

My approach is simple. Rather than looking at Google Trends data for just the Church itself, I’ll look at data for two different Mormon-related terms, one that’s more often used by Mormons, and one that’s more often used by non-Mormons. For the term more often used by Mormons, I chose “Come Follow Me,” an excellent suggestion Ardis made on my last post. Given that it’s a pretty well-known statement Jesus made in the New Testament, I wouldn’t have guessed how much its usage would be dominated by Mormons, but it clearly is. Looking at the Google Trends data, here are reasons I think it’s mostly being searched by Mormons:

  • Search volume is the highest for the US, and within the US, for Utah, followed by Idaho.
  • There are weekly Sunday peaks that disappear on Conference weekend.
  • The top five associated search terms Google Trends suggests are all Mormon related.

For the term more often used by non-Mormons, I’m using “Mormon,” which is ideal because President Nelson’s campaign to get us to stop saying it is clearly having an effect on people in the Church, but, not surprisingly, hasn’t been so quickly heeded by people outside the Church. As with “Come Follow Me,” the data looks consistent with the expectation of who’s using it, as the peaks are for Mormon-related news stories rather than for General Conference, when searches for the Church peak.

This graph shows daily results for “Come Follow Me” since the beginning of 2019.

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In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

I’ve seen the possibility floated in a number of places (e.g., in this W&T post) that when the Church resumes regular Sunday meetings, fewer people will go back than were attending regularly before the pandemic. I can certainly see the argument for this. It’s much easier to continuously keep up with a practice like weekly church attendance than to stop and start, particularly if there were already barriers making attendance difficult (distance, hearing offensive things, etc.).

I was wondering if there’s any way to forecast the degree to which this might happen by looking at what people are doing now, while not attending church. Of course this is an extremely difficult thing to measure. Not even individual wards, which typically have at least some sense of activity level from sacrament meeting attendance if nothing else, likely have much idea of what’s going on. But Google does. Google Trends tracks what people are searching for online. While this is obviously far from a perfect measure of how engage people still are with church while not attending, it might give us at least a little insight.

There are a few important things to know about Google Trends data:

  • You can get results by countries, states/provinces, and even metro areas. I wasn’t interested in geographic differences here, so everything I’ll show comes from worldwide results.
  • It doesn’t give absolute numbers–like the number of people who searched for something–but rather relative search numbers, comparing across search terms or across time for a single search term. It always gives results normed so the highest value is 100.
  • It lets you search for words (literal searches people have performed) or topics, where related searches about the same thing are aggregated. I chose to search for the topic “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” because I suspect Google is smart enough to aggregate searches like “Mormon church” and “LDS church,” and also because their help says that topics aggregate across languages. I also tried a few other LDS topics, but they gave a far smaller search volume, so for this analysis, I just stuck to that single topic.
  • You can get results back to 2004 and up to a few days ago. The granularity of the data you get depends on how long a time frame you ask for. If it’s short enough, you get daily data. If it’s longer, you get weekly or monthly. I wanted daily data from January 2019. This is a long enough period that if I asked for it all at once, I got weekly data. My solution was to ask for daily data in a series of three-month periods. Unfortunately, this means that each query for a three-month period was normed to a different maximum value. In order to make the results from the different three-month periods comparable, I set them to overlap a little. By doing this, I got two results for the days that appeared in both periods, and I could use the ratio between the values given for those days in the two periods to re-norm one period so that it was comparable to the other. I used a series of re-norming steps like this to stitch together the entire daily series from January 2019 to May 2020.

The graph below shows relative search volume for the Church for the entire period.

There are two extremely clear patterns: First, there are big spikes at General Conference time. Second, there are weekly spikes every Sunday. Both of these are probably unsurprising.

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In Statistics, Temple

A Temple-Announcing Spree

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

President Nelson announced eight new temples in General Conference on Sunday. This keeps up his pace from last year, when he announced 16 new temples across the two Conferences. Actual construction of all these new temples hasn’t kept up, though. Ground was broken for 11 new temples in 2019, but none have been started this year. This is why President Nelson’s spree seems to me to be more one of temple announcing than temple building. In any case, thinking about this gap between announced temples and built temples motivated me to look back at the data on the Church’s pace of the announcing, beginning construction on, and dedicating temples across the past few decades.

The graph below shows the year-by-year count of how many temples were announced, had construction begin, and were dedicated each year since 1950. I took the data from the list of temples on the Church website, and from Wikipedia where the information wasn’t available on the Church website because a temple is not yet dedicated or is being renovated.

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In Church Meetings, Statistics

Who bears their testimony in F&T meeting?

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

Who bears their testimony in fast and testimony meeting? I’m interested in this question not so much in the sense of which particular people do (“Oh, no, it’s Brother Mansplainer!”), but in the sense of whether it’s the same ten people every month or an ever-changing group.

To get some data on this question, I noted who in my ward bore their testimony in each of the 12 fast and testimony meetings in 2019. Of course it would be much better to have data from hundreds or thousands of wards and branches in different locations, but that would be really hard to get, so I decided to start with what I have. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted data for one month when I got a new phone and factory reset the old one, so what I’m working with is 11 months of data. I excluded the testimony that’s always borne by the bishopric member who’s conducting the meeting, as I was interested in tracking testimonies borne by people who chose to do it, and bishopric members are pretty much expected to do it as a matter of course.

In the 11 F&T meetings, 99 testimonies were borne, or an average of 9 per meeting. These 99 testimonies were borne by just 44 people, so the average person who bore their testimony bore it 2.25 times in the year. The maximum number of testimonies borne by any one person was 9, and this was achieved by two people, so together they accounted for over 18% of all testimonies borne. Of the 99 testimonies, four came from visitors and two from missionaries serving in the ward.

Before I get more into the question of the same ten people, I thought it might be interesting to look at a breakdown of the testimonies by age and gender, which is shown in this graph.

Most of the testimonies (82%) were borne by adults, with some teens (age 12-17) and only one child (age < 12). Women and girls bore more testimonies in all age groups (58% of adults, 76% of teens, 100% of children).

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In GA's, Statistics

The Selfish Gene (-ral Authority)

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

How often do General Authorities call their relatives to also be General Authorities? A friend asked me this question, and I thought it might be an interesting one to look at. Off the top of my head, I thought the answer would be that this happens a lot. For example, I remember President Hinckley protesting that he had nothing to do with the calling of his son as a Seventy, and I know about historical examples like Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Parley and Orson Pratt, and Bruce R. McConkie being Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law.

To make the question more manageable, I decided to look only at members of the Quorum of the Twelve rather than all GAs. This includes nearly all First Presidency members too because I looked at data at the person level (meaning that each Q12 member was counted only once, versus for example looking at the composition of the Q12 each year or something like that) and nearly all FP members were also Q12 members at one point.

The first analysis I did was kind of a quick-and-dirty approach that I think is nevertheless kind of fun. I listed the last names of all Q12 members, and then checked whether each, at the time of his call, brought a new last name to the Quorum. For example, two Johnson and two Pratts were called in the original Q12, so among the four of them, they brought only two unique last names. In this analysis, I counted Smith as being a duplicate the first time it was used, given that Joseph Smith was the head of the Church, even though he wasn’t a member of the Q12.

The graph below shows, across time, the cumulative count of number of Q12 members called (blue line), and the cumulative count of unique last names for those Q12 members (red line). If every single Q12 member had a unique last name, the two lines would be on top of each other. They separate to the degree that new Q12 members have last names that duplicate last names of previous Q12 members. Note that on the horizontal axis, I separated 1835 out as its own bin, because that’s the year the original Q12 were called. After that, I grouped years into 15-year bins, which I know is a little odd, but the calling of new Q12 members is such an infrequent event that when I used 10-year bins, there were several decades with few to no new calls.


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In General Conference, Statistics

Most Viewed Conference Talks on YouTube (Part 1)

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

What are the most liked General Conference talks? I wrote a post a few years ago where I looked at Facebook likes of talks to see which talks got the most likes. Unfortunately, when I went back recently to update this post, I found that the Facebook like button has been removed from the General Conference talk pages on lds.org. Using the Wayback Machine, I looked at site snapshots going back a few years, and it looks like this feature was removed in March, 2016. I was lamenting this fact on Facebook when my co-blogger Katya pointed out that Conference talks are still available on YouTube, and there are like and dislike buttons.

I wrote a little script to get the counts of views, likes, and dislikes for all the talks posted at the LDS General Conference YouTube channel. This includes talks from April 1971 through April 2019 Conferences. The channel also has videos for other things like musical numbers and statistical reports, but for this post, I’m just looking at the talks.

There are a total of 3,508 talks across the 97 Conferences, given by 473 unique speakers. Just as an aside, the data needed a bit of cleaning for me to make speakers’ names consistent, as there are typos in some of their  names (for example, A. Theodore Tuttle is identified once as “A. Theodore Turtle”), as well as straight up inconsistent naming (for example, M. Russell Ballard is identified at least once using the suffix “Jr.,” but most of the time it isn’t included).

Here’s a list of the top 20 speakers who have given the most talks.

Wow! Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson have each given over 6% of all the talks in the sample, and each more than twice as many as any other speaker. I guess this is no surprise given how long both served not only as Church President, but also in the First Presidency. President Nelson would have to live–and be healthy enough to deliver Conference talks–for over a decade to get close to them. It’s probably Elder Bednar, who doesn’t even make this list (he’s at #23 with 29 talks) who has the best chance of joining them, as he’s likely to serve as Church President for a long time.

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