Largest religious group

Largest religious group

Which religion the most people in a country are counted as holding, for 2010 and 2020. In all but seven countries that group is a majority, more than half. In Australia, Cote d'Ivoire, France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Mauritius and Singapore, no religion reaches half. There the largest group is only the biggest of several, and the label says less about the country than it seems to. It is a label, not a number, so it is stored apart and never used to measure a link. Seven categories cannot rise and fall with life expectancy, and numbering them would invent an order and a spacing that religions do not have. It is for grouping: reading any other measure across countries that share a largest religion. To measure links, use the religion shares already on the site.

What differs between the groups

The “between groups” figure runs from 0 (the groups are no different) to 1 (the groups explain all the differences between countries). Groups have no up or down, so this says how much the groups differ, never which way. For that, read the group averages. The figure also tends to rise when there are more groups. So to judge whether it could be chance (q), we shuffle the same labels among the same countries many times and see how often a figure this big turns up. Then we allow for the fact that many measures are checked at once, since with enough checks a few big figures turn up by luck alone. Groups with fewer than 12 countries are left out. And countries that share a label share a lot else. Adjusting for income rules out one third factor, but leaves language, region, legal tradition and history untouched.

The income rows are shown wherever they rank. Whether the groups differ in income is the question people most often bring to this table. They have no adjusted figure, since income cannot be adjusted for itself.

3 measures are left out of this ranking because largest religious group is worked out from them. A country whose largest group is one faith has a high share of that faith by definition. That is arithmetic, not a difference between places.

The version that is correlated

A share of the population is a number, so it goes through the same checks as every other measure. Each pair gets a link (r), from −1 to +1, before and after adjusting for national income. The error margins allow for countries in the same region being alike. And there is a correction for testing many pairs at once, so lucky finds are weeded out. Nothing about the subject is left out here. Only this one label is, since seven named categories are not a quantity.

The groups, and who is in them

Largest first. A pair page shows the link within a group only if the group has at least twelve countries. So the smaller groups here appear on no pair page at all.

Source

All indicators · How the country data works