State by State Rape Suicide and No Religion Rates from 2014 to 2020

1. No Religion Rate
The 2014 Data have been drawn from the Pew Religious Landscape Survey of that year.  Pew Research Center. (2015). U.S. public becoming less religious. Pew Research Center. Data for the years 2014 - 2020 are from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Public Religion Research Institute. (2015). PRRI Religion and Politics Tracking Survey. PRRI. https://ava.prri.org/media/methodology/PRRI-AVA%20Issue%20Topline%202014.pdf.  The data download process can be viewed at this URL: https://youtu.be/pG1KMFTjMso

2. Suicide Rate
The analysis makes use of state-by-state suicide rates.  This used the data extraction tool maintained by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) covering deaths for the years 1999-2020 (CDC, 2021).  The causes of death used for this analysis cover all those under the heading “Intentional Self-Harm”.  These include the range of description codes from X60 to X84 under the International Classification of Diseases 10th revision (ICD10).  CDC. (2021). Mortality 1999-2020 on CDC WONDER Online Database. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System.  https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html

3. Clery Act Rape Rate
The Office of Postsecondary Education’s campus security handbook defines rape as “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus, with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim” (Department of Education, 2016, pp. 3–6). All campus rape rates cited below are based on this new revised definition.  For the purposes of calculating campus rape rates the full federal data files were downloaded from the Web site of the U.S. Department of Education. https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/

4. UCR Rape Rate
The FBI reports state-by-state rape rates using a revised definition of rape (Federal Bureau of Education, 2013) that is identical to the Department of Education Handbook definition cited above.  The FBI’s legacy definition is not used in any of the analyses described below.  Just as institutions of higher education are required to report campus crime incidents to the federal Department of Education under the Clery Act, local police agencies are required to report crime incidents to the FBI under the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) program.  These rape rates are the number of crime incidents divided by the state population divided by 100,000.  Data was downloaded using the FBI's Crime Data Explorer.   https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/home