(ANALYSIS) Graduate school taught me plenty of technical skills: how to think carefully about causality, how to measure abstract concepts, and how to build statistical models that could separate signal from noise. <\/p>\n
It also taught me something less tangible. If you want to become truly good at scholarship, it has to be your primary obsession \u2014 at least for a while. There isn\u2019t much room for hobbies when you\u2019re trying to master a craft.<\/p>\n
But one of the most valuable lessons came at the very end of my methods training. After years of learning regression analysis and research design, we felt ready to explain the world. Our professors offered two words of caution.<\/p>\n
The first was an old saying: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We had learned a powerful statistical tool, but that didn\u2019t mean every interesting question could\u2014or should\u2014be answered with a regression model.<\/p>\n
The second warning has stayed with me even longer: don\u2019t use those tools to predict the future. Forecasting is a dangerous business. Even if you\u2019re right most of the time, no one remembers your successes. They remember the one prediction that turned out to be spectacularly wrong.<\/p>\n
Well, I was reminded of that lesson a few weeks ago when I stumbled upon a book written in the early 2000s by the Canadian sociologist Reginald W. Bibby<\/a>. In 2002, he published \u201dRestless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada<\/a>.\u201d His thesis can be derived from the title: Despite huge drops in religious attendance and involvement in Canada, there was a deep well of spirituality present in the population. It would just require churches to adapt a bit to bring in these seekers.<\/p>\n You can probably guess where this post is going. The Canadian General Social Survey<\/a> is fielded every year, but it doesn\u2019t ask about religion in every wave. However, it did include a battery of questions about religious affiliation, importance, and attendance in 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2020. This gives me ample data to test the theory of a religious revival in Canada. <\/p>\n