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Q:  I am trying to find vital statistics and church activity statistics for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for Utah. Does anyone have an idea where I might look?

A: We had two very helpful responses.

Armand Mauss suggested that the person asking about this information visit the new LDS Church library and archives in Salt Lake City.  While there, contacting Rick Turley would be a good idea as he would know if such information exists.  Other scholars who might have information on this would be: Tim Heaton, Tom Alexander, Bill Hartley, and Mike Quinn.

Anne Leahy did a bit of legwork to help answer the question.  She found a book titled “Membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Age and Region, 1910-2000” in the Church History Library.  She was kind enough to scan the relevant pages and send them to me digitally.  I converted the scans (pdf here) into an Excel spreadsheet, which you can download here.  The organization of the data is pretty bizarre as it includes cities, regions, counties and even some states as separate line entries.  Even so, it does provide membership information in the US from 1910-1957, when it was compiled.  To facilitate interpretation of the data, I added total LDS membership information for 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 from the Church Almanac.  Doing so allowed me to calculate the percentage of the membership of the LDS Church that was based in the US during those years (ranges from about 85% down to 79%).

I’m unaware of any other sources specifically on the LDS Church involving membership and vital statistics information.  However, there is also some helpful information on the Census Bureau’s website.  For instance, in the Eleventh Census of the United States – 1890 – Vol. IX, there is a Report on the Statistics of Churches in the United States.  That report provides some information on membership data at the county and state level.  Here’s a copy of the number of denominations by county information:

This figure doesn’t indicate the total number of Mormons in Utah, but provides a sense of the number of members, roughly, in the state.

A better table is this one from that same report:

This table summarizes the number of Mormons by state.  The bulk are in Utah and the surrounding states, but it does give a pretty good estimate of the number of Mormons in the US in 1890 – 144,352.  The LDS Church reports 188,263 members that year, suggesting roughly 76% of Mormons live in the US in 1890, and 62% lived in Utah.

I checked the other censuses prior to 1900 and they do not have reports on religious affiliation.  They do, however, have information on death rates.  If you use Utah as a proxy for Mormons around that time, this may prove useful.  Each of the Censuses is available on the census bureau’s website, starting with 1850, when Mormons were beginning to locate in Utah.  See here.  Another resource that may prove useful is the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which aggregates a variety of information.  A quick perusal of some of the Abstracts prior to 1900 suggest they only have information on the population of Utah, but not on vital statistics.  Later abstracts added additional information about populations, so you may find these more useful after the turn of the century.

Q: I was wondering if the Church has a specific meta-theory they employ when doing research? Is it perhaps mostly pragmatic for the case at hand? Or that the choice of meta-theory the researchers apply is up to themselves? Or is it just implicitly positvist?

A: Armand Mauss responded:

My knowledge and experience with the Research Information Division (now very far out of date) has suggested to me that the RID staff are engaged mainly in so-called “evaluation research,” which tends to be a-theoretical, no matter which institution is doing it.  Meanwhile, on the basis of some of my own earlier experience, here is an excerpt from my forthcoming memoirs that might be relevant to the question:

A person at the managerial level in the RID once offered me a revealing anecdote, which might be apocryphal, at least in part, but nevertheless illustrative: During preparations for a major longitudinal research project on conversion and retention, the in-house research team was asked for a progress report by Elder Bruce R.McConkie, one of the most conservative apostles. After he had listened to a recital of all of the variables that were to be measured as “predictors” of an investigator’s ultimate conversion, McConkie responded (in effect), “Well, all this talk about variables that will predict conversion is very interesting, but where in the conversion process have you made room for the influence of the Holy Ghost, which Moroni teaches is the power that really does the converting?” One of the researchers might have anticipated such a question, for he quickly replied (in effect), “Moroni instructs those who receive the teachings of the Book of Mormon to seek the confirmation of the Holy Ghost after they have pondered and prayed, and what we are studying as social scientists is the process that gets investigators to the point where they are motivated to ponder and pray for divine confirmation.” This partnership between research and revelation seemed to satisfy the apostle, and it illustrates well the pragmatic Mormon approach to managing the tension between the two in Church governance more generally.

Q: According to the Pew center, 32 percent of U.S. Mormons have “some college education.” This is the highest percentage I know of for any denomination (including non-Christian ones). However, only 18 percent have graduated from the college level (and 11 percent from a graduate education). Both of *these* figures, while still above the national percentage, Latter-day Saints are notably outperformed by Hindus and Buddhist (which may reflect the demographics of their emmigration), Jews, Orthodox Catholics, and the mainline denominations. Latter-day Saints tie with Roman Catholics and only outperform Evangelicals, historic Black churches, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. How is the LDS lack of completing their higher education best explained?

A: Several members of the MSSA responded with information to answer this question.  However, it is worth noting that, while the question asked about college non-completion rates for Mormons generally, all of the experts below noted that this is likely tied to gender differences in college attendance.

Rick Phillips made an important point about the nature of the Pew data:

This is another example of how findings from Pew’s study are skewed because they oversampled counties in Utah. The trend of women dropping out of college and the low percentage of Utah college students that are female does not square with the ARIS’s more representative sample, which shows no significant difference in the number of LDS men vs. women who have a college degree. Note as well that ARIS shows that significantly more LDS women in Utah than LDS women elsewhere are stay at home moms, so Pew is documenting a Utah Mormon phenomenon that is not as pronounced in the total U.S. LDS population.

Sherry Baker noted that Susan R. Madsen and colleagues, from Utah Valley University, have done extensive research on why young women in Utah are not attending and completing college at the same rates as young women outside Utah.  In one of the reports that was published based on that research, Dr. Madsen and her co-authors note that there is a connection to Mormon men serving missions.  This is reflected in the odd disparities in college attendance rates in Utah by age and sex.  At younger ages, women are closer to national averages in college enrollment, but that changes at older ages.  Dr. Madsen and colleagues suggest that what is driving this is Mormon men returning from missions, who then enroll in college.  The influx of returning Mormon missionaries would dilute the number of young women in college.  However, their study also finds that young women in Utah are dropping out after their first one or two years.  While it is not explicitly stated in Dr. Madsen’s research, the implicit suggestion is that women drop out after they find a husband to marry, probably a returned missionary.  She also notes that women in Utah major in low-paying, low-skill areas, like education, and are substantially under-represented in higher-paying majors like business and STEM disciplines.  Despite the above findings, in one of the reports, Dr. Madsen and colleagues conclude that devout female members of the LDS Church are encouraged to get a college education and seem to suggest that being LDS encourages college participation, rather than discouraging it.  This may be a case where explicit directives on the topic of education from the leadership of the LDS Church suggest one thing – college education is important for women – but many implicit directives in other areas end up pushing women away from completing college.  This is well-illustrated by another of Dr. Madsen and colleagues findings that Utah women have traditionally been better educated than the national average, but that historical pattern began to shift in 1993 and by 2000 Utah women were below average.  The Proclamation on the Family was released in 1995, and it says,

“By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.” (full text here)

In other words, Mormon women are told to get college educations but are also told that their place is in the home, taking care of kids.  The high rate of college non-completion is likely a result of the mixed messages these women receive.

Armand Mauss suggested that it would be difficult to arrive at a a definitive answer on this question without controlling for other variables:

I don’t think we can make much of such general figures without controls at least for age and for convert vs. lifer. Over the years, my impression from various data sets has been that the LDS Church tends to convert people of mainly modest education, who then produce children of much higher educational attainment.

In the interest of pursuing Dr. Mauss’s suggestion, I (Ryan Cragun), re-examined ARIS 2008 data to see what it can tell us about the educational attainment of Mormon men and women.  To begin with, Mormon men in Utah do have significantly more education than do non-Mormon men in Utah.  However, outside Utah, Mormon men do not have significantly more education than do non-Mormon men.  For Mormon women there is a slightly different pattern.  Inside Utah, Mormon women do not have significantly different educational attainment than do non-Mormon women; outside Utah Mormon women have significantly less education than do non-Mormon women.  These findings are detailed in the table below:

As far as Mormon men vs. Mormon women goes, Mormon men do have significantly more education on average, but most of that education is at the upper end.  There are negligible differences in college graduation rates across all Mormon men (26.2%) and women (28.4%), but Mormon men are substantially more likely to have graduate degrees (18.4%) than are Mormon women (7.4%).  Also, Mormon women are more likely to have some college (32.3%) than are Mormon men (23.7), suggesting there is a phenomenon of Mormon women dropping out of college, probably once they find a husband.  This data is shown in the table below:

However, there is a difference in educational attainment between Mormon men and women depending on where they live.  Mormon women outside Utah are more likely to have completed college than are Mormon men, but less likely inside Utah.  In both places, however, women are more likely to have some college than are men, as shown in the table below:

Finally, in an effort to more directly address Dr. Mauss’s point about controlling for age (convert status is not included in ARIS 2008), I ran two regressions.  The dependent variable was educational attainment with the categories shown in the above tables (technically an ordinal variable, but used here as an interval-like variable).  Educational attainment was regressed on (1) age, (2) whether or not the respondent is a Mormon (0=not Mormon; 1=Mormon), and (3) income (dummy coded as below $50,000 per year=0; above $50,000 per year=1).

The first regression included just the male participants in ARIS 2008.  All three variables in the equation are significant.  As age increases, educational attainment increases for Mormon men.  Being Mormon increases educational attainment for Mormon men.  And having more than $50,000 per year increases educational attainment (causality on this last one is, of course, tricky).  Here are the results:

The second regression included just the female participants in ARIS 2008.  Income is positively correlated with educational attainment.  Age and being Mormon, however, are inversely correlated with educational attainment, though the dummy code for being Mormon is not significant.  Here are the results:

In other words, even when you control for age and income, only men see educational benefits from “being Mormon”; Mormon women do not.