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There's another quiz out there and it's causing a stir.
By Jesse Oakley — Written on Sep 22, 2019
It seems like every day there’s a new online quiz to take, anything from “What Kind Of Person Is Your Destined Soulmate?” to “What Fruit Are You Based On Your Choice Of Car?”
If you want to take the Pew Research Religion typology quiz to get your own test results, here's the link.
Personally, I don’t take a whole lot of these, but there is one going around that seems to be getting a lot of attention recently.
Titled as a “Religious typology quiz” by the Pew Research Center, the goal is to determine what people’s religious stance is based on a series of questions.
When I first read the description of the quiz, I thought it was going to tell me whether I should remain a Christian or become a Buddhist, but that’s not quite it.
Instead what it does is determine how religious a person is through the classification of seven categories.
From most religious to not at all you have Sunday Stalwart, God-And-Country Believers, Diversely Devout, Relaxed Religious, Spiritually Awake, Religion Resisters and Solidly Secular.
The questions themselves are pretty simple and the quiz doesn’t take much time (it’s only 16 questions).
So just for all of you, I decided to take it to see what I’d get.
Now, I was raised Christian and still am, so I felt my result made sense for the most part.
Overall I agree with this, other than the part about immigration. However, I will say that I don’t really care for surveys like these.
They overly-simplify a lot of questions that required more than a yes or no answer.
Also, this poll has only surveyed around 4,000 people for its base data, which compared to the United States population of a little more than 329 million, isn’t really a lot of people.
It’s why while surveys can be useful, their data can also be skewed and inaccurate.
Survey problems aside, this one, in particular, has garnered interest over the web, with people posting their own opinions on this quiz. The results weren’t very positive.
As you can see, the thoughts on this quiz are fairly negative and understandably so. Just like anything else, while some people might think it’s great, there are others who think that it doesn’t live up to the hype.
It’s not like their complaints are unwarranted either. This quiz does leave something to be desired, with its No. 1 issue being that it gives the impression it’ll measure multiple religions when it really only measures Christianity. And of course, not everybody is Christian.
I think when it comes to surveys like this, it’s important to take your results with a grain of salt. Oftentimes what you get won’t be 100 percent accurate or it could really just be completely off-base altogether.
And in the case of this one, 16 questions really isn’t enough to determine how religious someone else might be.
Sometimes it seems like we put a little too much stock into these quizzes or surveys. Whether you got Sunday Stalwart or Solidly Secular, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you know what you believe and how to best live your life knowing that.
A five-minute questionnaire shouldn’t alter your life. So don’t go changing everything because you got apple because you drive a Hyundai.
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Jesse Oakley is a writer who writes about love, relationships, self-care and spirituality/astrology.