CONCEPTUAL DEPRIVATION AND STATISTICAL RIGOR.

The articles comments on social deprivation and religiosity. This research report adventitiously ignores its heritage in another respect, which is not uncharacteristic. It is by now a common and established finding that measures of religiosity are correlated with sex especially among Catholics, age, and education. The selection of indices of deprivation and to a lesser degree, of religiosity, is adventitious. This is attributable in part to the fact that this is a secondary analysis, but the difficulty arises frequently even where this is not the case. What is the validity for using age, femaleness and less education as an index for perceived state of deprivation. A rationale is indeed offered in the paper, as is not always the case and the authors are to be commended that they have recognized that this is indeed a question to be answered. The rationale that older age, femaleness and less education are indices of deprivation is plausible. But equally plausible would be the rationale that the young, males, and the more highly educated are likely to perceive greater deprivations.