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. 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.