How Individual Decisions Shape Religious Groups Over Time

Modeling religious change with agent-based models Societies are comprised of diverse individuals, each one characterized by their own goals, relationships, and personality. Modeling Religious Change uses cutting-edge agent-based models to incorporate and track individual characteristics, allowing us to measure the impact of complex factors on personal (non)religious identity and general religious change. Society-wide religious change results from […]

Forging New Directions in the Demographics of Religion

Modeling Religious Change combines demography, the scientific study of religion, and computational models to create simulations of religious change in the USA, Norway, and India. Our research tackles the challenge of creating more accurate projections of religious change in populations by taking account of multiple dimensions of religiosity. Building on our previous projects and traditional methods of creating religious projections, we have created agent-based models which synthesize multiple theories […]

Defining the Dimensions of Religiosity

Written by Jessie Saeli, Edited by Nicole R. Smith and Rachel J. Bacon What does it mean to be religious? Is someone religious because they go to Mass every week or because they pray facing Mecca five times a day? Is it because they eat a vegetarian diet or because they have a strong inner conviction […]

Understanding Changing Populations with the Cohort-Component Method

Photo by Cosmin Serban on Unsplash When governments set out to design long-term projects and plans, they need to know how many people those future projects must accommodate. Many turn to demographic projections to provide data on future population sizes and make-up. The cohort-component method (CCM) is commonly used by the government and academia to create these demographic projections. In a CCM […]

Adapting Cohort-Component Methods to a Microsimulation: A Case Study

Ivan Puga-Gonzalez, Rachel J. Bacon, David Voas, F. LeRon Shults, George Hodulik, Wesley J. Wildman Abstract Social scientists generally take United Nations (UN) population projections as the baseline when considering the potential impact of any changes that could affect fertility, mortality or migration, and the UN typically does projections using the cohort-component method (CCM). The CCM technique is computationally simple […]