Census data is never enough: How to make visible the religious diversity in Mexico

Since 1895, the Population and Housing Census of Mexico has included the variable ‘religious affiliation’, and this helped to affirm the monopoly of the Catholic religion. In the new millennium, the dynamics of religious diversification of recent decades required a change of design in order to captu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social compass 2017-06, Vol.64 (2), p.247-261
Main Authors: Gutiérrez Zúñiga, Cristina, De La Torre Castellanos, Renée
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Catholicism
Catholics
Census of Population
Censuses
Deinstitutionalization
Diversification
Housing
Identity
Membership
Minority groups
Monopolies
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Questionnaires
Religion
Religious identity
Sociodemographics
Teams
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Summary:Since 1895, the Population and Housing Census of Mexico has included the variable ‘religious affiliation’, and this helped to affirm the monopoly of the Catholic religion. In the new millennium, the dynamics of religious diversification of recent decades required a change of design in order to capture the new situation, making religious minorities visible in a way that would propitiate a culture of pluralism. To this end, a team of researchers worked together to capture the diversity of religions in Mexico for the 2010 census. In this article we shall describe: a) the methodological strategies developed to improve the census classifier, and a critique of its achievements in capturing the diversity of religious affiliations and memberships in Mexico; b) the need to combine a quantitative approach to religious affiliation with qualitative approaches to religious self-identification in order to describe and analyze religious deinstitutionalization and individualization tendencies, applying questionnaires to representative samples of the population.
ISSN:0037-7686
1461-7404
DOI:10.1177/0037768617697912