About 1.5 year ago I posted an analysis /comparison of two completions files I had made from the truthaboutscientology site. Between June 2011 and May 2015 an average 77 new names per month have been added to completions. http://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/estimates-for-new-members-and-total-membership.44306/ Now I did a similar analysis. Once again, I harvested a complete list. This new one has completions up until February 2018. Someone has been a busy bee! I checked against the 2017 completions list I mention in the above link. 8,707 new names have been added; 4,681 of them having a completion date between June 2015 and February 2018. This is an average of 142 new names per month. I don't have a good explanation why this is up from 77 new names per month in the previous analysis. Thoughts?
IMHO, the bump up in completions is more likely due to methodological changes in the way that names were published than in the actual rate of course completions in the underlying business. I would speculate that they are more thorough about publishing completions of minor courses (Keys to Life, Student Hat, the Communications Course and all the other low-level crap) than ever before. Back in the day, they probably omitted low-level course completions if they needed the designated amount of room to list people finishing the "big" stuff like OT levels. But now, with the slowdown in interest in Scientology after the TomKat divorce wave of bad press in 2012, they are probably under pressure to fill all the space they can with completions, so they are doing as much as possible to capture every single course completion, no matter how small. It may also be that there are things like "completions" for reading one of the books (remember the campaign to get 50,000 "completions" from The Basics book series, which means reading a book or listening to a single lecture series). It may also be that there's a surge in actual completions or in reporting of completions from countries where Scientology is growing, particularly in Taiwan, Mexico and, even more so, in Russia. If someone were able to segment the completions by difficulty of the course or its level "on the Bridge" and then look at which of those buckets changed, I'd suspect that the low-end courses jumped significantly as a percentage of total completions over the last 5 years. If completions were up substantially across all buckets of course difficulty, then that would argue forreal expansion, but I really doubt that's actually happening. People sometimes think there are significant numbers of duplicates added for women with multiple married names, which anecdotally appear to be more common among Scientologists than among the general population. But I think we can assume the number of inflated stats for women with multiple marriages is actually small. In the US, only about 6% of people will be married 3 or more times in their lifetimes (I looked it up, of course). So the number of female Scientologists appearing with multiple names in the database is still quite small, not enough to skew the numbers by more than 1% or 2% max, which falls substantially short of explaining this surge in reporting.
