Monthly Archives: April 2010

What Easter can tell us about churchgoing

Posted on April 19, 2010 by David Voas

Some of the best statistics we have about churchgoing come from attendance counts. Every year the Church of England, for example, publishes figures on Easter, Christmas and average weekly attendance based on data gathering a year or so earlier. Continue reading →

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Christians and the General Election

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats may currently be riding on the crest of a wave following last Thursday’s televised leadership debate, but he appears to have a lot of ground to make up with practising Christians in the UK. … Continue reading →

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English Church Census, 2005 – Dataset Released

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

On 30 March the Economic and Social Data Service released for secondary analysis the dataset from the 2005 English church census, conducted on 8 May of that year under the auspices of Dr Peter Brierley of Christian Research and sponsored … Continue reading →

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Tolerance of Religion

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

ComRes has just released on its website the results of an opinion poll it conducted for the BBC on 26-28 February 2010, which does not yet appear to have been publicized by the BBC itself. A representative sample of 1,005 … Continue reading →

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Who should run State Schools?

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Who should run state schools? A new survey commissioned by two trade unions, NASUWT: The Teachers’ Union and Unison, has posed just that question. It was conducted by Ipsos MORI who interviewed a representative sample of 1,211 adults aged 15 and … Continue reading →

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Christian Schools and Social Selectivity

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

A new report from the Sutton Trust suggests that Christian state secondary schools in England are more socially selective than their secular counterparts. Entitled Worlds Apart: Social Variation among Schools, it has been prepared by Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson … Continue reading →

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The Nationality of Numbers

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ingrid Storm

As interesting as studying religion in Britain is, we often want to know to what extent what we find here is similar or different to the results from other countries. However, a problem with cross-national comparative studies of religion (and other social opinions, attitudes and behaviours) is that national context can make a huge difference to the meaning of certain concepts. Continue reading →

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Christian Smith on research into religion: repositioning scholarly journal articles

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

A summary of Christian Smith’s paper, ‘Five Proposals for Reforming (Especially Quantitative) Journal Article Publishing Practices in the Sociology of Religion toward Improving the Quality, Value, and Cumulativeness of Our Scholarship’. Continue reading →

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Taking Part in England

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

The Taking Part in England survey is a large survey of cultural and leisure participation in England, sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The first was fielded in July 2005 and it has been run annually since then. The current collection agency is BMRB Social Research, which operates the survey via face-to-face interview. Continue reading →

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Bible Reading and Bible Origins

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Spring 2010 issue of Word in Action, the Bible Society’s magazine, contains an article by Jennie Pollock entitled ‘Positive Vibes for Bible’. This sets out the headline findings of a recent opinion poll commissioned by Theos, the public theology … Continue reading →

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