Quantcast


Advertisement

Demographic Duo

Email | Print | Text - Text +

January 31, 2012 | 3:38 pm

Lost Positives: Estimating the American Jewish Population

Posted by Bruce Phillips

In a recent Blog entry my colleague and co-blogger, Pini Herman, questioned Len Saxe’s estimate of 6.4 million Jews, arguing that the over-estimate was the result of “false positives,” meaning non-Jews who report Judaism as their religion. In the 2004 San Francisco study we did weed out some false positives.  More importantly, however, we also did not interview (and thus did not count) many more persons who had a Jewish parent but answered no to this screener question: “Do you consider yourself to be Jewish, either ethnically or by religion?” It could well be that if we pushed further (an effort the San Francisco Federation was not willing to underwrite) they might have considered themselves Jewish in some other way, and there would be even more Jews in the Bay Area. So Pini is wrong on that one, but correct in focusing on the extensive screening needed to identify Jewish households.

The basis of Saxe’s argument is that the refusal rate in telephone surveys is getting higher and Jews are more likely to refuse than others.  In his meta-analysis Saxes emphasizes that the lower the refusal rate in the 51 surveys he examined, the higher the percentage of Jews, and he provides some other evidence as well. Saxe makes a valid argument. It should also be noted that other eminent social scientists such as David Marker accept the lower 5.4 million estimate of the 2000 NJPS. 

Going back to a time when conducting Jewish population studies was easier, Sid Goldstein (truly the father of American Jewish demography) estimated that the American Jewish population to close to six million in 1970, but he did not expected Jewish numbers to increase because Jewish fertility was well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman. The estimate of 5.4 million Jews in 2000-2001 would be a logical outcome of this low fertility. So how could the Jewish population have remained stable or even increased?  Intermarriage is one answer. Almost twenty years ago two sociologists at UC Berkeley asked “How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Became 40 Million Irish Americans” (American Sociological Review, 1994, 59:1). The answer was that generations of intermarriage had produced 40 million persons who listed “Irish” as one of their ancestries.  Along these same lines, Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University has recently estimated that 12 million Americans of Jewish ancestry would qualify for immediate Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.

Regardless of the debate over the size of the Jewish population, all Jewish demographers agree that the Jewish population in the midst of a sea change. Jews are more dispersed, and soon there will be more Jews with a non-Jewish parent than with two Jewish parents. These important changes have gotten lost in the Jewish press. It is easier to complain about the lack of consensus among Jewish social researchers than to grapple with the unquestioned consensus among them: this isn’t your father and/or mother’s Jewish population any more.

Click to See or Make Duel Comments

Bruce Phillips is a Professor of Jewish Communal Service in the School of Non-Profit Management, HUC-JIR/Los Angeles and USC. Bruce is among the leading sociologists studying the contemporary Jewish community, specializing in the sociology and demography of American Jewry.  Bruce can be found playing banjo, mandolin and other stringed instruments in the Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills Shabbat Unplugged live Bayit (House) Band on many Friday nights.pini00003@gmail.com

8 Comments — Leave your comment

Share this post: del.icio.us Favicondel.icio.us Digg FaviconDigg Facebook FaviconFacebook Google FaviconGoogle Reddit FaviconReddit StumbleUpon FaviconStumbleUpon Technorati FaviconTechnorati YahooMyWeb FaviconYahooMyWeb

COMMENTS

We welcome your feedback. Comments may not exceed 700 characters.

Privacy Policy

Your information will not be shared or sold without your consent. Get all the details.

Terms of Service

JewishJournal.com has rules for its commenting community.Get all the details.

Bruce, as social surveyors we are limited to the self-definition of respondents.  Ultimately we have to classify survey respondents as the classify themselves.

I monitored an interview older gentleman answered no to whether he was a Holocaust survivor and all the other indicators pointed to yes.  I called him to re-interview. His mother was Jewish and his father, a Wehrmacht officer and though he had suffered,his family perished, he said he wasn’t a Holocaust survivor.  I accepted that self-definition in the survey. As a social scientist it is not my role to “push further” only to convey information, to analyze and to comment.

Comment by Pini Herman on 1/31/12 at 4:44 pm

I have an ethical responsibility to accurately collect and report the information conveyed to me by research subjects. If I routinely, and without informing the subject, ignore a normatively non-Jewish self-definition and self-description by shoehorning it into another category, such as Jewish, I am excluding subjects actual self-identities from consideration. 

Research is inalienably and inevitably political (Letherby and Bywaters, 2006). DellaPergolas’s example that 12 million Americans of Jewish ancestry would qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return demonstrates it clearly. Ultimately, we as American Jews self-define who is an American Jew, not the Israeli government.

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 12:01 pm

Is it a bit premature of Len Saxe to come out with a Jewish population figure that purports to be authoritative, almost census-like replacing a decennial NJPS? He then seemingly disavows it, citing unknown error in the last paragraph of the study report:
“.......we treat our data not as census information, but as probabilistic survey data, with inherent error.  Although we have not identified all of the sources of error, and the present report represents a modest step, we hope that this approach leads the way to being able to understand survey error.  Our goal is simple: to improve the validity and utility of data about the American Jewish population at a reasonable cost.”

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 5:17 pm

I’m not quite sure that Saxe argued that Jews are more likely to refuse telephone surveys. They are not. Saxe’s reliance on a rather modest online Jewish sample, on which many of his estimation assumptions rest, is worrisome.  Saxe’s use of a probability based online panel of 50,000 households yielding 1,300 Jewish households as the basis from which the sundry 150 surveys were demographically harmonized to yielded his magic 1.8 percent of the nation’s population being Jewish.  This may be a case of error in the online Jewish online panel compounding error in the harmonized 150 surveys, of which the GSS, I was waved off of using for Jewish population estimation by its PI, Tom Smith.

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 5:37 pm

The tiny sub-sample on which he based his under age 18 population component would have yielded a Jewish population estimate of 7 million and so, inexplicably and modestly, he pulled back, almost 9 percent, to an estimate of 6.4 million Jews. Somewhere a population the size of Los Angeles’ Jewry was left arbitrarily on the cutting room floor as Saxe et. al. write “Including these 2.1 million children in the total population estimate yields a total Jewish population in excess of 7 million. For present purposes, we have not done so…..”  I’m wondering what their present purpose, and even more worrisome, their future purpose is?

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 6:10 pm

Telling was a table about families with children and their Jewish education sub-sample cells were so small that the category of 5 children is empty, but 4 and 6 were populated.
Brandeis can’t improve their estimates without a more robust sample and its attendant higher cost. The sample of the Knowledge Networks online probabilistic panel yielded only 1,082 Jewish households, to attain something like the scale of a national or New York or LA study, 3 to 5 times the number of Jewish respondents would have to be obtained. This means GFK, the omnibus panel survey owner, would have to increase the size of their panel to 150 - 250 thousand, an unlikely investment of tens of millions of dollars.

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 6:26 pm

I think Brandeis has hit a wall in terms their boast of finding a low-cost technique.  They can only ride the low cost coattails of an omnibus survey, in this case Knowledge Networks, so far. So they jump off and hang on to the next trolley, the 150 cheaply available surveys that were done for someone else and and happen to ask “What is your religion?”  This jump to the 150 surveys, harmonized to a tiny Jewish Knowledge Networks sample only compounds unknown error which both the original and harmonized surveys may share.  The main source of error is that compared to non-Jews, Jews are enthusiastic survey takers. Jews will more likely vote and more likely to stay for the exit poll.

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 6:49 pm

What make a more enthusiastic survey taker?  Higher levels of education, income, health, leisure, news consumption, political involvement, occupational attainment.  Sounds like Jews, doesn’t it. So what if Jews are enthusiastic survey takers? Well, that can bump up their share in the surveys Saxe used to estimate the Jewish population and may be enough to account for a million extra Jews.  That would only be double the 600,000 Jewish kids he arbitrarily decided not to put in his final estimate.  Other sources of unknown error such as non-Jews calling themselves Jews may be greater than Saxe was able to ferret out from his online panel and impossible from surveys long completed by others.

Comment by Pini Herman on 2/01/12 at 7:15 pm

Post a Comment

Name:  
Email:  

Type the word you see below:

Comment:


About this Blog

Blog Home
About the Blogger(s)
Contact

RSS


Blog Archive






Newspaper

Serving a community of 600,000, The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles is the largest Jewish weekly outside New York City. Our award-winning paper reaches over 150,000 educated, involved and affluent readers each week. Subscribe here.

© Copyright 2012 Tribe Media Corp.
All rights reserved. JewishJournal.com is hosted by Nexcess.net. Homepage design by Koret Communications.
Widgets by Mijits. Site construction by Hop Studios.

counter fake hit page