We recommend specifying question 5 and asking either about formal affiliation or perceived affiliation with a religious community.
Question 5: Proposal 1 (formal affiliation)
Are you a member of a church or com religious community?
Question 5: Proposal 2 (perceived affiliation)
Regardless of whether you are a member of a church or a religious community, do you feel like you belong to a particular religion?
Intention of the question:
Questions 5 to 7 are intended to capture the respondents’ religion.
Findings:
The frequency distributions of the answers are shown in table 5. As can be seen from table 5, no test person in the pretest belonged to a non-Christian religious community, which is why question 7 could not be tested.
The purpose of the pretest was to examine how respondents define their membership in a religious community and whether they base membership on their membership in a church (and, for example, paying church tax), their religiosity, or something else.
All but two respondents tied their religious affiliation to a formal status, i.e., whether they had been baptized, paid church tax, or had left the church:
Of the two respondents who based their religious affiliation on their religiosity (TP01, TP05), one stated that he did not belong to any church in Germany but was a believer ("Well, I'm not registered as a Christian in Germany, don't pay dues. But I am a believer.", TP05, answer question 5: A Christian community). The second respondent asked whether the question was about formal status or whether one engaged in religious practices. In the end, she stated that she was not religious and (despite the fact that she had been baptized) chose the answer option "No religious community":
Two test persons (TP06, TP10) were unfamiliar with the term "community of faith." Subject 06 correctly concluded that (for Christians) this question is about belonging to a church. Subject 10, however, had difficulty answering question 5 without the context of the follow-up question 6:
