Atlas of Religion in China

This atlas maps religious sites and describes social and demographic characteristics of religious believers in contemporary China.; Readership: All people interested in religion in China; academic libraries; research institutes on China

Atlas of Religion in China

This atlas maps religious sites and describes social and demographic characteristics of religious believers in contemporary China.; Readership: All people interested in religion in China; academic libraries; research institutes on China

Mapping Religious Sites in China: A Research Note

Drawing from visual studies scholarship, we highlight current and persistent critiques of sociological visualization, note recent developments in visualization tools for sociologists, and propose how sociologists can be reflective about their visualization choices. As a case study, we outline the visualization development and selection process in our project of mapping Chinese religious venues. We explain the visualization challenges we faced, the visual biases we hoped to manage, the strengths and limitations of various visualization methods we identified, and how we selected visualizations for varying research queries. In addition, we provide a list of considerations for fellow sociologists working to visualize geospatial point data

Measuring Religiosity of East Asians: Multiple Religious Belonging, Believing, and Practicing

Social surveys normally assume that respondents adhere to a single religious faith in belonging, believing, and practicing congruently. Some surveys even take religious identity as the singular measure of religiosity and examine its relationship with other variables. This practice, however, fails to capture nonexclusive and hybrid religiosity, which is arguably the traditional and normal pattern in East Asia while becoming increasingly common in the West. We have developed a new set of survey questions and conducted a survey among East Asian international students at an American university. The findings show that multiple religious belonging, believing, and practicing are quite common, the level of believing and participating in religions varies substantially, and no confession-based single measure of religious identity or practice is sufficient for measuring religiosity. We recommend this set of improved measures of religiosity be adopted in future surveys in East Asia and probably in the West as well

Religious Heterogamy and the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion in China

Research has long demonstrated that parents who do not share the same religious tradition produce less religious children than parents who do. Therefore, religious heterogamy has been associated with the generational decline of religion in Western societies. How about China, where religion has been resurging in the last few decades? Existing studies suggest two opposing possibilities, the restrictive and repressive national context may diminish parental impact on religious socialization, or the family of religious minorities withstands contextual pressures. Using the 2007 Spiritual Life Survey of Chinese Residents, we applied logistic regression modeling to examine patterns of association between having one or two religious parents during childhood and current religious affiliation, beliefs, behavior, and salience of the respondents in China. Analyses reveal that despite China’s atheist education system and strict religion policies, having at least one religiously affiliated parent is associated with increased religiosity compared to having two nonreligious parents. As the number of interreligious marriages rises in Chinese society, religious heterogamy contributes to the growth of religion among younger generations. Whereas religious heterogamy in the West has a secularizing effect on the next generation and contributes to religion’s decline, religious heterogamy in secular nations such as China has a religionizing effect and contributes to religion’s rise

Polynomial Chaos Expansion for Probabilistic Uncertainty Propagation

Uncertainty propagation (UP) methods are of great importance to design optimization under uncertainty. As a well-known and rigorous probabilistic UP approach, the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) technique has been widely studied and applied. However, there is a lack of comprehensive overviews and studies of the latest advances of the PCE methods, and there is still a large gap between the academic research and engineering application for PCE due to its high computational cost. In this chapter, latest advances of the PCE theory and method are elaborated, in which the newly developed data-driven PCE method that does not depend on the complete information of input probabilistic distribution as the common PCE approaches is introduced and improved. Meanwhile, the least angle regression technique and the trust region scenario are, respectively, extended to reduce the computational cost of data-driven PCE to accommodate it to practical engineering design applications. In addition, comprehensive comparisons are made to explore the relative merits of the most commonly used PCE approaches in the literature to help designers to choose more suitable PCE techniques in probabilistic design optimization