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The National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) is a nationally representative telephone survey of 3,290 English and Spanish-speaking teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, and their parents. The NSYR also includes 80 oversampled Jewish households, not nationally representative, bringing the total number of completed NSYR cases to 3,370. The purpose of the NSYR is to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of American youth; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral, and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent and perceived effectiveness of the programs and opportunities that religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in youth's lives, in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion. [See More...]

The second wave of the NSYR longitudinal telephone survey was designed to be a re-interview of all Wave 1 youth survey respondents. Parents of the youth respondents were not re-interviewed. At the time of this second survey the respondents were between the ages of 16-21. Like the Wave 1 survey, the Wave 2 survey was conducted by telephone using a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system. The survey was conducted from June 9, 2005 to November 24, 2005. For this second wave of the survey, we only conducted interviews in English. Four youth respondents did not participate in the Wave 2 interview due to not being able to understand or speak English. We did translate our pre-survey mailing to Spanish for respondents we knew to have Spanish-speaking parents or guardians. Additionally, a call center staff member was available to conduct the verbal parental consent in Spanish. The Wave 2 telephone survey questionnaire covers many of the same topics as the Wave 1 questionnaire. Many of the questions are identical so that change can be measured precisely. However, the Wave 2 questionnaire was re-designed to take into account changes in the lives of the respondents as they began to enter young adulthood. The Wave 2 survey includes new questions pertaining to behaviors occurring during the transition to adulthood, such as non-marital cohabitation, educational and career aspirations, pregnancy and marriage. [See More...]

In Wave 3 every attempt was made to re-interview all English-speaking Wave 1 youth survey respondents. At the time of this third survey the respondents were between the ages of 18-24. The survey was conducted from September 24, 2007 through April 21, 2008 using a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system programmed using Blaise software. The Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Odum Institute) was hired to field the Wave 3 survey. Telephone calls were spread out over varying days and times, including nights and weekends. Every effort was made to re-contact and re-survey all original NSYR respondents (whether they completed the Wave 2 telephone survey or not), including those out of the country, in the military, and on religious missions. There were more difficulties in contacting and completing the survey with respondents who were in the military during Wave 3 because some of them were serving on active duty and were unable to be reached. Even their families were often unaware of their specific locations and did not have any knowledge of phone numbers or addresses where they could be reached. The Wave 3 Survey instrument replicated many of the questions asked in Waves 1 and 2 with some changes made to better capture the respondents' lives as they grew older. For example, there were fewer questions on parental monitoring and more on post-high school educational aspirations. [See More...]

The fourth wave of the NSYR survey was designed to gather a final round of data on respondents, aged 23 - 28 at the time of survey fielding, which took place between February 2013 and December 2013. Every attempt was made to include as many Wave 1 participants as possible, including those who had not participated in Wave 2 and/or 3. For the first time in Wave 4, data were collected using both an online survey (for 85 percent of respondents) and a phone survey (for the balance). Participants were randomly sorted into the online and phone groups for purposes of methods comparison, and once survey fielding began, there was some movement between groups to accommodate respondents who either couldn't or wouldn't take the survey online, or who would only agree to participate in the survey if it was online. The survey instrument was programmed using the Qualtrics survey software of the Qualtrics Research Suite. Online survey respondents were sent a personalized link to the survey and completed the survey independently. Phone surveyors called phone survey respondents at a pre-arranged appointment time, and used the Qualtrics software to conduct the survey. Quite a few of the questions on the Wave 4 survey replicated questions from previous waves, and additional questions were added to capture relevant information about respondents' young adult lives. [See More...]