Advanced search options
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The advanced search items allow users to restrict the search in different ways. It is not necessary to do so – less restrictive, better-targeted basic searches will be more useful. Nevertheless these are the options for additonal search restrictors: 1. Exclude Words. Here you can refine your search to exclude certain text. For example, if you want to find all sources containing the word Women but not the word Vicar, put Women into the main search box and Vicar in the Exclude box.
2. Faith Community. The ‘faith community’ field category includes information where available on the faith community, or religious denomination, to which the source refers. This is in the nominative rather than genitive case: Islam rather than Muslim, or Church of England rather than Anglican. To restrict the search to specific faith groups or denominations, choose a faith community from the drop-down menu. The advantage here is that we have coded the sources using specific terms to maintain coherence across the records. This aims to help users who might otherwise fail to find sources by using divergent spellings or terms. A table is included in the Glossary of catalogue terms giving the specific terminology chosen for faith communities. 3. Type of Data. In this field a description of the what the source measures (specifically the aspects relating to religion) has been provided. Examples: BRIN 2669, Enjoyment of spending more time in church at Christmas. BRIN 2598, Identification with religion and nationality; attitudes to people of different faith traditions; perceptions of Muslims and associations of wearing a headscarf; actions necessary for inter-faith integration; attitudes of Muslims and non-Muslims to social and moral issues 4. Date. You can choose to enter a particular year here. If you want to search on a range of years, use the final Date Start/End search box. 5. Geography. Sources are available covering a variety of spatial levels. The options are:
Note that where a source covers both England and Wales, searching on either will identify this source. 6. Sample Size. Here the search choices are restricted to allow users to browse sources covering all sample sizes, or only those above a certain number. For example, 1,000 is often taken to be the threshold at which analysis of subgroups - such as church attendance by age group - can be conducted with reasonable accuracy. However, in some cases survey topics or target populations are rare and therefore valuable even where sample size is small, which is why they are included here. The over 20,000 option helps identify large censuses. 7. Population. This category describes the base population being sampled. At present, this has a free text search function which allows users to restrict the search, for example, to groups such as ministers, clergy, women, men, children, pupils, or adults. Note that the population does not merely mean a group of people but can also include other units of analysis. Examples here include a particular faith group’s membership, church attenders only, newspaper readers only, the set of MPs of a given Parliamentary term, and the set of Church of Scotland parishes over 1835-37. 8. Demographics. For faith community-collected data sources in particular, this field provides information on which demographic characteristics the faith community recorded details. Large national surveys would generally be expected to collect data on characteristics such as respondents’ age, sex, marital status, socio-economic status and ethnicity, so this information is not provided for the social survey or opinion poll sources. 9. Subject keywords. This field lists keywords associated with the source to summarise the subject of survey questions or characteristics of official or organisation-level sources. We have maintained standard keywords have been used throughout. For example, the keywords for the 2007-08 Home Office Citizenship Survey (BRIN 2622) are:
Anglicans, anti-Semitism, Britishness, Buddhists, charitable giving, Christians, church attendance, church collection, churchgoing, citizenship, civic engagement, community cohesion, customs and traditions, discrimination, employment, ethnic minorities, freedom of religion, friends, Government, Hindus, importance of religion, integration, Islamophobia, Jews, job, Muslims, prejudice, Protestants, racial prejudice, religious affiliation, religious beliefs, religious groups, religious harassment, religious identity, religious practice, religious prejudice, respect for all faiths, rights, Roman Catholics, school, Sikhs, social mixing, values, volunteering, work 10. Collection Method. It is always important to know how data have been collected because different methods may introduce different types of bias. The options here are:
11. Collection Agency. Here we have structured the search options, selecting the most prominent survey firms and organisations. This makes it possible to browse all the surveys conducted by Gallup, or NatCen, which included religion items; or to browse the sources created by the Church of England. Many organisations have not been listed here because of space constraints – university departments, niche survey firms, and smaller faith communities . However, they can still be searched for by name through the main search box. 12. Published Source. This field provides bibliographic details of all the published works which draw on the data source. If you have written work or know of works which are not listed but draw on the sources, please contact us with the details. If you know that a given source was reported in a particular book or article, and remember the author’s name or the title of the text, then you can search for it here. Similarly, to browse all the outputs of a given author, enter their surname here. Where no published source is given at all, contact the research sponsor or data collection agency in the first instance. 13. Date Start/End. If you want to restrict the search to a particular period, specify the start and end years here. |
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