Conrad Hackett

Conrad Hackett
Pew Research Center | PEWRESEARCH

Ph.D.

About

39
Publications
114,220
Reads
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1,043
Citations
Introduction
Conrad Hackett is a demographer at the Pew Research Center. He is an expert on international religious demography and how religion influences population growth. He is an author of The Global Religious Landscape, Global Christianity, The Global Catholic Population and various other studies of religious demography. He has discussed global religion with numerous media outlets, including BBC, CNN, the Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Education
September 2001 - August 2008
Princeton University
Field of study
  • Sociology, Demography

Publications

Publications (39)
Book
Full-text available
Even if all migration into Europe were to immediately and permanently stop – a “zero migration” scenario – the Muslim population of Europe still would be expected to rise from the current level of 4.9% to 7.4% by the year 2050. This is because Muslims are younger (by 13 years, on average) and have higher fertility (one child more per woman, on aver...
Article
Full-text available
Among the world’s major religious groups, Muslims have the lowest median age and the highest fertility rates. Due to these demographic factors, Muslims are expected to increase in number faster than any other major group in the period between 2015 and 2060, growing at more than twice the pace of global population growth.
Book
Full-text available
This report provides estimates of the global religious landscape in 2015 and projections of change through 2060. It focuses on expected births and deaths by religion. It includes survey data about the expectations of Americans regarding changes in the global religious landscape.
Book
Full-text available
Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling, according to a Pew Research Center global demographic study that shows wide disparities in average educational levels among religious groups. These gaps in educational attainment are partl...
Book
Full-text available
The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing, driven primarily by differences in fertility rates and the size of youth populations among the world’s major religions, as well as by people switching faiths. Over the next four decades, Christians will remain the largest religious group, but Islam will grow faster than any other major religio...
Article
Christianity in China grew rapidly in the decades following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Some scholars and journalists claim that Christianity in China is still expanding in the twenty-first century. In this study, the authors contrast evidence for such claims with the results from two decades of survey data. In 19 nationally representative...
Article
Cross-national studies of age patterns among couples have tended to compare the ages at which men and women first marry, but few have analysed age differences between current spouses or cohabiting partners (i.e. partner age gaps). We address this gap in the literature by using recent census and survey data to analyse age differences between current...
Book
Full-text available
This report seeks to answer the question: What might the religious makeup of the United States look like roughly 50 years from now, in 2070, if recent trends continue? We try to address this not with sweeping predictions or grand theories, but with mathematical projections that combine techniques standardly used in demography (the study of human po...
Article
This paper presents new estimates of the U.S. Jewish population based on a 2019–2020 Pew Research Center survey, which used a stratified address-based sample of all Americans to screen more than 68,000 respondents and complete full interviews with more than 5,800 adults who are Jewish or have some kind of connection to Judaism. We estimate there ar...
Article
The question of how Protestantism (including evangelicalism) is measured in social science research is of keen importance to those seeking to understand religion in American life. In this article, we compare and contrast two of the leading techniques for classifying Protestants. One of these approaches (the RELTRAD approach) categorizes respondents...
Article
Full-text available
Some U.S. surveys measure many religious identities, including detailed Protestant affiliations. Researchers must decide how to aggregate these diverse identities. There are now a variety of options for aggregating religious groups into categories. Depending on the research question, it may be appropriate to use one of the existing options or to de...
Book
Full-text available
Lower religious observance among younger adults is common around the world, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center surveys conducted in more than 100 countries and territories over the last decade. Although the age gap in religious commitment is larger in some nations than in others, it occurs in many different economic and social cont...
Article
Past research, typically focused on Christians in Christian nations, has found that women tend to be more religious than men. This study uses original nationally representative data (N = 5,601) with strategic oversamples of minority groups to examine variation in how religion and gender intersect across ethnoreligious identities in Israel. We demon...
Article
Full-text available
At the global level, Muslim women are less educated and have wider gender gaps than all other religious groups except Hindus. This is consistent with previous findings of lower female attainment and wider gender gaps in Muslim-majority countries. However, Muslim women made large educational gains in recent cohorts. As a result, Muslim women are cat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Past research, typically focused on Christians in Christian nations, has found that women tend to be more religious than men. This study uses original nationally-representative data (N=5,601) with strategic oversamples of minority groups to examine variation in how religion and gender intersect across ethnoreligious identities in Israel. We demonst...
Article
Objectives: The religious landscape of older adults around the world is changing profoundly. Yet until now, no study has chronicled these changes or compared expected aging patterns of religious groups. Differential aging among religious groups can have important economic and social consequences. This study estimates and projects the future religio...
Book
Full-text available
On all the standard measures of religious commitment examined in the study, Christian women are more religious than Christian men. By contrast, Muslim women and Muslim men show similar levels of religiousness on all measures of commitment except frequency of attendance at worship services. Because of religious norms, Muslim men attend services at a...
Chapter
The role of demography for the future size and composition of religious groups has been raised by several scholars (Kaufmann 2010, Norris and Inglehart 2011). Application of multi-state population projection methodology proved fruitful for shedding more light on possible future changes in the religious landscape (Goujon, Skirbekk and Fliegenschnee...
Article
Full-text available
People who are religiously unaffiliated (including self-identifying atheists and agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular”) made up 16.4% of the world's population in 2010. Unaffiliated populations have been growing in North America and Europe, leading some to expect that this group will grow as a share of the wo...
Article
Full-text available
Conrad Hackett shows the complexities of acquiring information about religious believers (and non-believers). How do we know about the size and characteristics of different religious groups throughout the world, and what inferences can be drawn from the data? In this exclusive discussion with Joan Garrod, Dr Conrad Hackett of the globally renowned...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The influence of religion on demographic behaviors has been extensively studied mainly for Abrahamic religions. Although Buddhism is the world´s fourth largest religion and is dominant in several Asian nations experiencing very low fertility, the impact of Buddhism on childbearing has received comparatively little research attention. O...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Disaffiliation from religion is an important factor behind the rapid rise in persons claiming no religious affiliation in many advanced industrial countries. Scholars typically think of disaffiliation as a life course process that is confined to young adults, with little change occurring among older adults, yet few studies have examined...
Book
Full-text available
The Yearbook of International Religious Demography presents an annual snapshot of the state of religious statistics around the world. Every year large amounts of data are collected through censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and a host of other sources. These data are collated and analyzed by research centers and scholars aro...
Article
Full-text available
Measuring religious identity is complex. The author offers seven suggestions for those who wish to describe and understand religious identity using survey data: (1) Definitions and measures of religious identity shape knowledge about religious groups;(2) Variation in question wording leads to variation in responses;(3) Comparing results across surv...
Article
Objectives The objectives of this study are to investigate the traits that clients find important in professional social service providers, comparing confidence in client management skills (friendliness, experience, and knowledge) to desire for demographic characteristics (being of the same race and religion). Methods To accomplish this task, we us...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This poster highlights key findings from a new report on the Global Religious Landscape (full report and sortable tables at http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape.aspx). In addition to new 2010 population estimates for the world’s major religious groups, this is the first report (to the best of our knowledge) providing the median ages o...
Book
Full-text available
Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 w...
Book
Full-text available
A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically widespread – so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim t...
Article
The international religious data in the World Christian Database (WCD), and its print predecessor, theWorld Christian Encyclopedia (WCE) have been used frequently in academic studies and the popular press. Scholars have raised questions about the WCD's estimates categories, and potential bias, but the data have not yet been systematically assessed....
Article
Several investigations of American evangelicalism have been conducted in recent decades, yet they conceptualize evangelicalism in different ways. It is not surprising, therefore, that different profiles of the evangelical movement and its adherents emerge from these studies. This research reviews major studies on the subject undertaken since 1976,...
Thesis
Full-text available
Religion and fertility are closely linked yet scholars dispute how religion influences fertility in the United States. Some scholars suggest differences in fertility rates between major religions have disappeared. Women who actively participate in congregations have high fertility but there is no consensus about the causal mechanisms involved. A st...
Article
Full-text available
In this essay, I provide new information about the congregational participation of emerging adults (ages 18 to 29) in the United States. These results are based on my analysis of data from the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, which was completed in worship services by over 100,000 adults in 436 congregations during the weekend of April 29, 2001. Th...
Article
Drawing on a new community study of more than 2,000 residents of low-income neighborhoods, we examine information about the kinds of service organizations respondents have contacted for assistance and the perceptions of these respondents about the effectiveness and trustworthiness of those organizations. We compare contact with and perceptions of f...
Article
Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus have become an increasingly significant part of American religion in recent years. Yet scholarship on these groups has been limited largely to case studies and qualitative observations. We analyze data from a large national survey that permits comparisons among Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians. The dat...

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