Reflections on Surveying Religion Online: Perils and Promise?

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Gladys Ganiel

by Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast.

I presented the results of my surveys of religion on the island of Ireland this weekend at the annual conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland (May 7-9, 2010 at Queen’s University in Belfast). All three of the papers presented were about religion, and all three utilized quantitative data of some sort.

Prof. Tom Inglis of University College Dublin, one of the leading sociologists of religion in Ireland, commented that he is increasingly frustrated with the perils of survey questions when it comes to asking people about their faith.

Survey questions about religion often ask people if they believe in God, heaven, hell, sin, etc.; or to quantify the frequency of their religious practice. These measures have been important for helping sociologists to chart the ‘decline’ of religion in the West. But as Inglis pointed out, such questions do little to give us in-depth understanding of how people think about ‘meaning of life’ questions.

Supplemental qualitative interviewing is often a good method for complementing religious survey results with more nuanced perspectives.

But is it possible to include a built-in qualitative component in quantitative surveys of religion? I have experimented with this in my current research on religion in Ireland. This involved developing online surveys for faith leaders and laypeople, which included a range of conventional multiple choice/tick box questions, coupled with open ended questions where people had the opportunity to ‘write in’ responses to amplify their responses or make entirely new points.

The online data-gathering method provided people with the time and space, if they were inclined, to type thoughtful and sometimes lengthy responses. Commenting on these surveys, Prof. John Brewer of the University of Aberdeen highlighted the importance of these ‘free text spaces’:

“…the resulting fervour to write comments in free text spaces gives us a wealth of qualitative data that surveys of any kind do not normally disclose. Let me suggest that the free text will end up as important as the statistics for this survey.” (Click here to read further.)

For example, the survey questions focused on religious approaches to diversity/immigration, reconciliation and ecumenism. These are topics about which there are few agreed definitions. So the open ended questions provided people with the opportunity to define reconciliation and ecumenism for themselves – or to tell us that they thought that these issues weren’t all that important!

The blending of the quantitative and the qualitative within the survey format may not be possible in all large-scale surveys of religion. But I think that it is a promising way forward, especially when used in small-scale, online surveys on religious topics. For example, my surveys of religion in Ireland received responses from more than 700 faith leaders and 900 laypeople – far more than I would have had time or opportunity to interview.

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The Nationality of Numbers

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ingrid Storm

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.

In my research, I compare religiosity in Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, and find large differences that are only partly due to differences in what we would call “levels of religiosity” and just as much to do with differences in historical and political contexts. For example, more than eighty percent of the Danish population are members of the Church of Denmark, even though only a tiny proportion attend church regularly. Like in other Scandinavian countries, a large proportion of Danes seem to be members because they never bothered to opt out rather than as a result of a conscious decision.

DenmarkBritainRel

This is not to say that church affiliation is a meaningless variable. Perhaps this is not “religion” in the pure sense of the word, but as researchers we are often interested in how different expressions of religiosity have different connotations. Qualitative research has revealed that even as church membership is extremely common in Denmark despite otherwise widespread secularism, it is still important to many people in Denmark  as a way of expressing their identity or cultural heritage, supporting the maintenance of church buildings and last but not least because they want church services at important rites of passage such as weddings and funerals.

Nevertheless, the problem remains: how can such statistics be meaningfully compared to those of for example Britiain, where church membership is an expression of personal religiosity to a much larger extent? There is no easy answer to this. In studies involving a large number of countries one can control for national context through multilevel analysis. The problem here is that even when one does observe national differences it can be difficult to understand what these differences signify.

In smaller comparative studies such as my own, involving only a small number of countries, there is no statistical method available. Rather, the only option is to supply the quantitative analysis with rich historical and contextual analysis of each case country:  the relationship between state and church, the levels of religiosity, the changes in recent years and so on.

Knowledge of the national context informs us not only of why one can observe differences but also what variables it is most meaningful to compare in the first place. Sometimes context dependency makes like for like comparisons inadvisable. In the above example it would make more sense to compare Danish church membership with British self-stated “belonging to a religion” rather than British church-membership.   In other words, even for larger comparative studies, contextual knowledge is an important supplement to statistical analysis.

Ingrid Storm is a PhD student at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester


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