Mainline Denominational Switching in Canada: Comparing the Religious Trajectories of Growing and Declining Church Attendees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on the survey responses of over 1000 attendees of growing and 1000 attendees of declining Mainline Protestant churches in Canada, this research examines patterns of denominational switching and the characteristics of switchers from both groups. Based on previous Canadian research we hypothesized, among other predictions, that the majority of our Mainline Protestant congregants would never have switched denominations and, of those who had, a plurality would indicate that their previous church was part of another Mainline Protestant denomination. These hypotheses were supported when the responses of growing and declining church attendees were combined but when the responses of the growing church congregants were tabulated separately they were not supported. We show how the switching patterns of the growing Mainline Protestant church congregants are more akin to those of Canadian Conservative Protestant church congregants and we offer explanations as to why this may be the case. Keywords: Religious Switching; Reaffiliation; Church Growth; Mainline Protestant; Conservative Protestant; Canada
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".