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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, The Jewish Federations of North America sponsored NJPS 2000-01. Their 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

Methodology

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 The Jewish Federations of North America, 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 The Jewish Federations of North America'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. The Jewish Federations of North America's current 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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