Month: August 2011

Okay, some follow up. I had to go question by question to tabulate the responses as Survey Monkey doesn’t let you filter responses on a free account.

Out of 100 people, 18 people self-identified as a Christian.  11 of them had read the Bible in its entirety, giving us an approximate “Yes” percentage of 61%.

Now here’s the funny part:

A slightly larger percentage of non-Christians who took this survey had read the Bible in its entirety.  However, if you take a look at the bar chart from yesterday’s post, you’ll notice a lot more people claimed to be non-Christian than Christian.  I am not a statistician, and the survey population was only 100 people, but I am wondering how statistically significant that 5% would be considered.   I am genuinely surprised at how close the responses are.

First off, this is an almost textbook example of a poorly-written survey that does not actually answer the question asked, even though it does give some interesting data.   Kiddiewinks, spend more time in the design phase!  (I’m always telling my students this in various classes, and here I am not doing it.  I hang my head in shame).

Some friends of mine and I were discussing religion when one of them mentioned that he had never met a single self-identified Christian who had read the entire Bible.  I found that such an odd thing to say, since we were both reared in the same denomination and the practice was encouraged in the church I attended as a youngster, that I started asking around.  The answers I got became a little complex, so I designed this rather simplistic survey.  Unfortunately, as designed, it cannot answer the question originally discussed:  Is it really unusual for Christians to read the Bible cover to cover?

Even though it doesn’t fulfill the original intent, the answers are interesting nonetheless.  It does seem a lot of non-Christians have indeed read the entire Bible.

Curious, that…