Modeling Religious Mobility by UniODA-Based Structural Decomposition

Paul R. Yarnold

Optimal Data Analysis, LLC

Analysis assessed structure underlying the cross-classification of religious affiliation of N = 1,995 adults, and their religious affiliation when they were 14 years of age. Typically true when using legacy methods to model mobility applications, no satisfactory linear model was identified, encouraging the authors to comment: “It is difficult to conceive of other models that could shed light on this nominal-by-nominal mobility table, or for that matter, on other square tables of a similar kind.” UniODA-based structural decomposition revealed that the stability model (elements fall into the major diagonal of the table) fits the data very well, but the residual sample is too small to justify additional structural models due to insufficient statistical power.

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