NJPS Home ---> NJPS Report --->

Preamble

-Download NJPS Report PDF -Download PowerPoint Summary

United Jewish Communities (UJC) and the Jewish federation system sponsored the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) 2000-01 in order both to determine the size and key characteristics of the American Jewish population and to provide a policy-relevant portrait of that population so as to assist those planning communal services. Planning for the NJPS, undertaken by UJC, the NJPS Trustees and the National Technical Advisory Committee (NTAC), a volunteer committee of academic and survey researchers, was completed by mid-2000, and the telephone survey itself was conducted in the twelve months between August 2000 and August 2001.

On October 8, 2002, UJC released key demographic findings from NJPS, and the release of additional findings was planned for the UJC General Assembly scheduled for the following month. In that intervening month, however, a number of issues arose with respect to the NJPS data.

The issues and challenges that had been raised focused primarily on (i) missing data, (ii) weighting and design effects, (iii) response rates, (iv) accurate counting of the overall Jewish population as well as specific groups within it, (v) the "screener" questions that had been used to qualify individuals to participate in the NJPS, and (vi) comparability between the 1990 and the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Surveys.

As a result, UJC announced that further releases would be postponed. At the same time, UJC asked me to act, on a volunteer basis, so as to assist the organization in considering these issues and where appropriate responding to them. After a review of the NJPS and its implementation, I came to a number of conclusions. First, that the basic conception and survey design of the NJPS was not a matter of consensus within either the service or the research community. As with any complex undertaking, there were a variety of alternative routes that might have been taken although none of these would have been without the challenges of all survey research, especially with respect to particularly small populations. Second, that despite the issues of basic design and the further difficulties that emerged in the implementation process, there remained much of value in the NJPS data and that, therefore, steps should be taken to validate the NJPS and make its findings available to national and local Jewish communities.

Therefore, in the months since November 2002, the UJC staff -- in conjunction with NTAC, RoperASW (the firm that conducted the survey's fieldwork) and special consultants -- worked on all of these matters. A full listing of the issues is presented in the methodological appendix to this report along with instructions on how to obtain more information about them.
 
Finally, in view of the complexity of the project, the concerns raised, and the broad interest in the findings, UJC accepted my advice and commissioned a final external review of the technical aspects of NJPS. Mark Schulman, President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the leading professional organization for survey researchers, and a team of three other experts reviewed issues of sampling, screening, response rate and weighting. Their report, available on the UJC website, was very useful and, in general, validated both our assessment of the integrity of the NJPS data and its limitations. 

This second release of NJPS data by UJC reviews and expands some of the demographic issues covered in the first release of October 2002. In addition, it presents a range of findings on Jewish identity, involvement and community connections. These findings represent, however, only a small subset of the information now available from the NJPS data file, information that should be of considerable interest to researchers and other analysts in the coming months and years.

Although the review process delayed release of the NJPS data, it enabled UJC to be satisfied with the value of the work, to possess confidence in the data themselves, and to have a clear sense of the data's limitations. I am convinced that the months taken to review the study have confirmed it contains a tremendous amount of important and reliable information for Jewish communal organizations, the wider American Jewish population, and of course for academic researchers who specialize in contemporary American Jewry.