Information Junkies Wanna Know… More

Inter­est­ing fac­toids, like how many Amer­i­cans prac­tice yoga, spread like wild­fire across the Web and blo­gos­phere. But get­ting any per­spec­tive on those fac­toids can be much harder to find, and in some cases, impos­si­ble.

This morn­ing I uncov­ered a web-based infor­ma­tion vor­tex when I tried to find out how many Amer­i­cans cur­rently prac­tice yoga. I fell into a cir­cu­lar spi­ral, with no end point, and lost track of time while try­ing to find out more. I found numer­ous blogs and news arti­cles pub­lished around the world in 2009, all cit­ing a fac­toid released by the Yoga Jour­nal based on a poll con­ducted by Roper Research:

A recent Roper poll, com­mis­sioned by Yoga Jour­nal, found that 11 mil­lion Amer­i­cans do yoga occa­sion­ally and 6 mil­lion per­form it reg­u­larly.

Source: A Jan­u­ary 2009 arti­cle pub­lished by Reuters. This arti­cle can be down­loaded from Yoga Jour­nal. More detailed infor­ma­tion is not pub­licly avail­able from Yoga Jour­nal (at least not by online means).

None of the jour­nal­ists or blog­gers who refer to this fac­toid can explain what is meant by “reg­u­lar” ver­sus “occa­sional” prac­tice. (The Reuters arti­cle released by Yoga Jour­nal does not define these dis­tinc­tions.)

What’s Interesting Is What They Don’t Say

Hav­ing found so many ref­er­ences to the same slim source, I find myself intensely curi­ous about the ques­tions that are not answered:

• Does the fac­toid refer only to Amer­i­cans who live in the US, or does it include Cana­di­ans too?
• How many men prac­tice yoga?
• How many peo­ple, by age group, prac­tice yoga? Are peo­ple trend­ing older or younger?
• How often do reg­u­lar prac­ti­tion­ers prac­tice yoga, and why?
• How do occa­sional prac­ti­tion­ers dif­fer from reg­u­lar prac­ti­tion­ers?
• What fac­tors might moti­vate some­one to shift from occa­sional to reg­u­lar prac­tice?
• How many classes do reg­u­lar prac­ti­tion­ers take on a weekly or monthly basis?
• How often do reg­u­lar yoga prac­ti­tion­ers do their asanas at home ver­sus in a class envi­ron­ment?
• Are occa­sional prac­ti­tion­ers more likely to attend class, or fol­low a DVD at home, or run through their own set of asanas at home?
• How do their spend­ing habits dif­fer?
• Is yoga prac­tice spread evenly across house­hold income lev­els, or are there inter­est­ing pat­terns?
• What about edu­ca­tional lev­els?
• What are the regional vari­a­tions? Coastal or urban dwellers ver­sus “Heart­land?”
• How many peo­ple teach yoga?
• What’s the (for­give the expres­sion) “viral impact” of reg­u­lar prac­ti­tion­ers? How many new­com­ers become yoga prac­ti­tion­ers as a result of refer­rals by friends?

You can comb through 3 pages of Google search results and find noth­ing beyond cita­tions of the same fac­toid, with point­ers to the same Reuters arti­cle and the same one-sen­tence fac­toid.

Nowhere is there any in-depth infor­ma­tion about the actual poll: when it was con­ducted, how many peo­ple were sur­veyed, using what method­ol­ogy, how sta­tis­ti­cally valid the sam­ple is, etc., etc. There’s no infor­ma­tion about the spe­cific ques­tions posed in the sur­vey.

The final report from Roper is not read­ily avail­able online, most likely because it was pro­pri­etary research for Yoga Jour­nal, con­ducted for rea­sons that aren’t explained. (We can guess: for adver­tis­ing rate cards.)

But it leaves us hun­ger­ing for more… It would have been a real ser­vice to the yoga com­mu­nity for Yoga Jour­nal to have shared deeper insights than the slim fac­toid that is cur­rently cir­cu­lat­ing around the Inter­net. It’s hard to believe they would com­mis­sion research from Roper sim­ply to find out how many peo­ple prac­tice yoga…

Per­haps the next time they com­mis­sion research they’ll struc­ture the deal to per­mit a broader shar­ing of results.