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NJPS 2000-01 is intended to provide a comprehensive social
and demographic portrait of the American Jewish population.
The data are designed to help understand contemporary Jewish
life and to be used for communal planning, policy making,
financial resource allocation, Jewish education, and
scholarly research.
The current survey is the latest in a series of
socio-demographic studies conducted by the Jewish Federation System. In the late 1980s, national Jewish federation
leaders recognized the need for up-to-date survey data on
American Jews, and sponsored the National Jewish Population
Survey (NJPS) 1990. The study, sponsored by the Council of
Jewish Federations and directed by Professor Barry Kosmin,
was released in 1992. Its findings helped to redefine the
communal agenda and were widely cited. In addition to the
highlights report, many studies were published using data
from NJPS 1990, including the SUNY Press Series on American
Jewish Society in the 1990s.
To meet the need for new information a decade later,
United
Jewish Communities (UJC) and the Jewish Federatin System sponsored NJPS 2000-01. The UJC
Research Department directed the study with the assistance
of the
NJPS National Technical Advisory Committee, a
distinguished group of researchers, statisticians,
demographers and federation professionals.
Questionnaire
The NJPS 2000-01 questionnaire was prepared with input from
research scholars and communal professionals. The questions
were generally more detailed than the parallel items in NJPS
1990. The survey was designed to gather information about
the size, geographic distribution and socio-economic
characteristics of the Jewish population. In addition, the
survey includes questions about family structure, fertility
and marital history, intermarriage, Jewish identification,
religious practices, Jewish education, synagogue
affiliation, philanthropic behavior, social service needs,
and relationship to Israel.
Methodology
NJPS 2000-01 was administered between August 2000 and August
2001 by telephone. Random digit dialing techniques were
employed based on a sample frame of U.S. residential phone
numbers, oversampling areas of high Jewish population
density. The initial sample included more than 1.2 million
phone numbers. Eventually about 180,000 households were
reached. Interviews were completed with about 4,500 Jewish
adults, age 18 and older, residing in the 50 United States.
In addition, approximately 650 "people with Jewish
background" (PJB) were interviewed using a shorter version
of the NJPS questionnaire and 4,000 non-Jews were
interviewed as part of the National Survey of Religion and Ethnicity (NSRE) 2000 to enable researchers to compare Jews with non-Jews.
The NJPS Screener included four questions and these were
used to classify respondents as Jewish, PJB or non-Jewish:
1. What is your religion, if any?
2. Do you have a Jewish mother or a Jewish father?
3. Were you raised Jewish?
4. Do you consider yourself Jewish for any reason?
These questions assess religious identification, parentage,
socialization, and social-psychological identification.
Decision rules regarding respondent selection were built into
the screener design. In addition, in households where the
respondent interviewed was not the person who completed the
screener due to random selection of a respondent within a
household, the four screening questions were repeated to
verify the Jewish identification of the respondent. When
possible, qualified respondents were immediately interviewed
after completing the screener. The questionnaire elicited
extensive information about the respondent and one randomly
selected child. In addition, detailed information for some
variables was collected about spouse/partner and basic
demographic information was collected for all adults and
children in the household.
The questions used to screen for Jews in NJPS 1990, listed
below, were slightly different, and were asked in a somewhat
different order.
1. What is your religion? If not Jewish--Then...
2. Do you or anyone else in the household consider
themselves Jewish? If no--then...
3. Were you or anyone else in the household raised Jewish?
If no--then...
4. Do you or anyone else in the household have a Jewish
parent?
NJPS 2000-01 is a stratified random sample and researchers
should use appropriate weights in any analysis. The
datafile contains several types of weights (for household-
and individual-level analyses). Issues regarding weights are
discussed in both the Study Documentation and the Datafile
User Guide.
The methodology used in NJPS 2000-01 was reviewed by a panel commissioned by the UJC, chaired by Mark A. Schulman, Ph.D. The "Study Review Memo" was released in September, 2003, just prior to the official release of the NJPS study report and data. The PDF version available via the Data Bank has a revised version of the sampling allocation codes table (Appendix 1), which shows the relationship between the Sample Allocation Code scheme and UJC's definition of Jewishness used for the NJPS 2000-01 report.
The United Jewish Communities Report on the National Jewish
Population Survey 2000-01 indicates "....in cooperation with
The Mandell L. Berman Institute - North American Jewish Data
Bank." This statement reflects implementation of a
contractual agreement executed in the 1990's between the
Council of Jewish Federations and Mandell Berman, on behalf
of the then Data Bank previous academic partner, City University of
New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. UJC's new Data Bank
partner, University of Connecticut, had no role in the design and
execution of NJPS, or in the development and writing of the
Report.
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