Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Religion

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Religion is a product of the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH is a qualitative-quantitative encyclopedic database of historical religious data across time and space. Data are contributed to the project by academic experts and overseen by a panel of editors. The data take the form of answers (provided by experts) to a long list of standard questions grounded in time and space.

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Religion is “standard” in a different way than its namesake, The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). The SCCS was designed to control for region and cultural relatedness. Because of our mostly bottom-up, expert-driven data gathering method, DRH data is heavily overweighted in certain time/space regions. Analysts will have to control for this as they see fit.

On the other hand, DRH data is “standard” in the sense that whatever Group, Place of Text is being portrayed, experts are answering a standardized set of questions, allowing a degree of comparison and quantitative analysis that has simply never been possible before. As the DRH grows, top-down data-gathering pushes will be targeted at underrepresented regions of the world, with the goal of making future versions of the SCCSR more and more comprehensive.

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Religion (SCCSR.v2) is provided under CC-BY-4.0 license.