File related to Jewish Federation community study

Las Vegas 1995 The Las Vegas 1995 Jewish Community Study was directed by Dr. Gary A. Tobin of the Institute for Community and Religion, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University. Other project members were Dr. Joel Streicker, Dr. Gabriel Berger, and Minna Wolf from the Cohen Center at Brandeis, and Keith Schwer, Director, Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. The project was funded by the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas, with Amy Boruszak serving as Chair of the Planning Committee. The screener asked three questions to qualify households for the survey: (1) ?What is your religion? Would you consider yourself to be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or something else?? (2) ?Was anybody in your household born or raised Jewish?? (3) ?Is there anybody else in your household who currently considers him/herself Jewish [used for non-respondent converts to Judaism]??1 After establishing a household as ?Jewish? via these three screening questions, the household was re-contacted later to complete the interview.1 A combination of RDD [random digit dialing] and Federation List [with added distinctive Jewish surnames ? DJN] methodologies was used for the telephone surveys. A total of 451 households were interviewed, with a total of 982 individuals living in those households. The RDD sampling frame consisted of 49,829 phone numbers which were used to contact 10,750 households, of which 4,196 completed the screening process in order to determine Jewish concentrations by aggregated zip code areas. A total of 316 households were identified as Jewish, and 152 of these households completed the RDD interview. The LIST/DJN sampling frame was constructed by merging Federation lists, synagogue lists, a sample of DJNs from the telephone directory, and then purging the list to eliminate business numbers and duplicate households. From a resultant list of 8,684 households, a sample of 5,118 households was drawn, 2,452 were contacted, and 1,000 completed the screening process. Of the 1,000 screened households, 789 were identified as qualified Jewish households, and 299 completed the interview from the list/DJN sampling frame. 1 A fourth question was asked for research analysis, but not used to qualify individuals for the interview: (4) ?Do you or does anybody else in your household have a Jewish mother or father?? 1 The RDD interviews were conducted in 1995 by the Center for Economic and Business Research at the University of Las Vegas, while the List/DJN interviews were conducted by Market Solutions of Phoenix, Arizona, which was also enlisted in the refusal conversion process on the RDD sub-sample. The authors of the final report noted: ?...the Las Vegas Jewish Community Survey posed a special challenge given that this area is known as one of the lowest response rate areas in the US. Among the several factors that the researchers cited for the relatively low completion rate among Jewish households (299 completed of 789 identified in the LIST/DJN frame = 38% completion of identified Jewish households) were: (a) the high percentage of people working in the hotel and gaming industries making it very difficult to locate potential respondents at regular interviewing times; (b) Las Vegas has one of the fastest growing populations in the US and as such has been heavily targeted by market research firms, leading to a steady decline in respondent cooperation. The researchers estimated that 29,100 Jewish households resided in the Las Vegas area, with approximately 67,000 people living in those households; 55,600 of these individuals are Jewish. Data file users should note that the weighting factor incorporated into the data files projects to 29,100 households, 66,892 persons living in these households, and 55,568 Jews. The final report was issued in 1996, and although the interviews were completed in 1995, the study title indicates a 1996 study date. The Data Bank?s policy is to date all studies based on the year of completion of interviews. The report, Jewish Federation of Las Vegas: Community Study, is approximately 170 pages, 16 figures, and approximately 227 tables. Las Vegas 1995 Data Files Two files were originally created in SPSS: a household data file, and an individual data file. (1) The household data file (?hh?) has 451 cases and 270 variables. ?Sample? indicates whether the interview derived from the Federation List/DJN sample or from the RDD framework; ?WtFactor? is the household weight factor; projects to 29,100 Jewish households. (2) The individual household member SPSS data file has 982 cases and 61 variables. Using ?WtFactor? in the individual data file yields a projected N of 66,892 people living in Las Vegas Jewish households.