for the Sciences University of Notre Dame Inside : The Effect of Urbanization on Bird Foraging at Notre Dame

This study examines the effect of the performance of the Notre Dame football team on American Catholic church attendance. Using data taken from the General Social Survey across eleven recent years and the statistical package STATA, I regressed a myriad of variables on Catholic church attendance to explore the effect of Notre Dame football. After determining the relevance of a broad spectrum of inputs, a regression revealed that the success of the Notre Dame football team has a small yet statistically significant positive correlation with American Catholic church attendance. Introduction What determines a person’s religious involvement? What factors contribute to how often a Catholic attends Mass? Is it a person’s age? What about marital status, income, location of residence, or education? Is it a combination of all these and more? These are very difficult questions to answer because there is no one aspect of a person’s life which can accurately determine that person’s religious involvement in the form of attending Mass. Undoubtedly, the many complicated aspects of Catholic people’s lives combine to effect their decision as to how often to attend Mass. However, something one might not think of when pondering this topic is the effect that the most prominent American Catholic university’s football team has on the nation’s Catholics. There is a saying that goes: “The second most important person in the Catholic Church is the quarterback of the Notre Dame football team.” This study will test that statement. Using econometric techniques, I attempt to determine whether the success of Notre Dame’s football team has any discernible effect on Catholic church attendance. Procedure The General Social Survey (GSS) conducts periodic surveys of many aspects of Americans’ lives [1]. They ask questions ranging from age and marital status to political party affiliation to religious church attendance, and beyond. Their results are compiled in spreadsheets and are available to the public for use in studies such as this. The surveys from 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 were used in this study. Because these surveys were conducted in the early months of the year, the previous college football season was used in determining the relationship between the success of the football team and Catholic church attendance. For each of the surveys, I used the outsheet function in Stata to convert the data for select variables to an Excel comma delimited spreadsheet. I included in my data set those variables that I thought directly contribute to a random person’s religious involvement. I combined all the data into one spreadsheet