Halloween, Take 2

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Today is Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve). We reported on 1 October (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=629) about the rapidly growing financial value of the market in Halloween-related products and also noted last year’s Angus Reid Public Opinion (ARPO) survey on the observance of Halloween in Britain.

Fresh data are now available from a YouGov poll commissioned by The Sun newspaper and conducted online on 27-28 October among a representative sample of 1,571 Britons aged 18 and over. Full results have been published at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-Sun-Halloween-291010.pdf

18% of the whole sample said that they were planning to celebrate Halloween this weekend. This was 4% more than told ARPO in 2009 that they always celebrated Halloween, although an additional 45% then said that they sometimes did.

YouGov recorded no real difference in the celebration of Halloween by gender and social class. However, age was significant: 33% of the 18-24s and 28% of the 25-39s planned to mark the festival but only 15% of the 40-59s and 5% of the over-60s.

Regionally, Scots intend to celebrate Halloween most (28%), followed by Londoners (20%). Party political preference is also a factor: 25% of Liberal Democrats will be Halloweeners but 15% of Conservatives.

Even those who will not be Halloweening themselves are likely to get the ‘trick or treat’ knock on the door tonight. While 38% of all adults regard this as a harmless tradition, 44% (including 54% of the over-60s) consider it an unacceptable annoyance.

Of the 24% with children of the appropriate age, 38% think they will go trick or treating tonight and 56% not. The highest incidence is anticipated by Labour voters (45%), the 18-24s (47%), and residents of Northern England (44%) and Scotland (45%).

If you are planning to answer the door tonight, YouGov has some advice about what to hand out to the trick or treaters, based on its SixthSense children’s confectionery study. You can certainly forget about trying to palm them off with anything nutritious or non-sugary, and dark chocolate is not well-received either. See:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/consumer/trick-or-treat

POSTSCRIPT [21 November]

A further Halloween poll was conducted in October by TNS Omnibus, among an online sample of 1,046 adult Britons aged 16-64. 25% said they would be personally celebrating Halloween and spending on average over £30 to do so. For the TNS press release, see:

http://www.tns-ri.co.uk/what-we-do/6863.aspx

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Who Believes in Horoscopes?

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Horoscopes have been a prominent feature of British life since the 1930s and still regularly appear in newspapers and magazines and on websites. They form an important part of the complex spectrum of alternative ‘religious’ beliefs. But what credence do we attach to horoscopes?

Some clues have recently been provided by YouGov in a survey of a representative sample of 2,090 adult Britons aged 18 and over. They were interviewed online on 10-11 October. Full data tables and a commentary are now available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/life/stars-their-eyes

Unprompted, a mere 2% of Britons did not know what their star sign was, suggesting a high astrological awareness. 41% (26% of men and 55% of women) thought the set of characteristics attached to their star sign fairly summed up their own personality and exactly the same number took the opposing view.

While 39% never read their horoscope, 7% did so daily, 15% weekly, 13% monthly and 26% less frequently. Regular (monthly or more) readers were especially to be found among women (48%, against 20% of men) and the 18-24s (43%). Of all horoscope readers, two-thirds consulted them in newspapers, one-third in magazines and one-sixth on the internet.

Despite the attention paid to horoscopes, most of us do not rate their veracity. 83% considered them to have been inaccurate in predicting events in their personal lives, compared with 6% (rising to 10% of women) who said the contrary.

Just 7% agreed and 64% disagreed that horoscopes predict the future by monitoring the movements of cosmic objects. Only 5% (9% among the 18-24s) admitted that reading a horoscope had ever influenced a decision, action or event in their life.

55% contended that horoscopes have no grounding in reality and 77% dismissed them as vague statements presented in a way that makes them appear applicable to most individuals. 60% regarded horoscopes as harmless fun.  

As a cross-check on the survey results, YouGov conducted an experiment, quoting a personality profile and a horoscope prediction for the past week which purported to be particular to the respondent’s own star sign.

In reality, everybody was shown the same profile and prediction. Amazingly, as many as 39% of the sample said the profile matched their own personality, although far fewer (13%) thought the prediction to be accurate.

Previous polling on astrology and horoscopes is not strictly comparable with the current survey. However, the available data (http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/#ChangingBelief) do confirm the far greater propensity of women to believe in horoscopes than men.

The disproportionate appeal of horoscopes to the under-25s is also not new. While increasingly rejecting traditional Christian beliefs, there is a fair bit of evidence that the young are drawn to a variety of alternative religious systems.

One of the stranger correlations to emerge from this YouGov study related to Liberal Democrats. Although they are only average regular readers of horoscopes, they were somewhat more likely than voters for the other two main parties to think horoscopes can foretell the future and to have been influenced by reading a horoscope. And they were more convinced than the rest about the accuracy of their own spoof profile and prediction.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Charitable Choices

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Clive D. Field

What we do with our money tells us something about what sort of people we are, including our values in life. From this perspective, the findings of a recent YouGov poll would seem to indicate that religion does not feature high on our rank order of priorities.

YouGov interviewed online a representative sample of 1,903 adult Britons aged 18 and over on 6 and 7 October. They were asked a couple of questions about how they would donate £10 for charitable purposes.

Given thirteen options for donating this money, and being invited to select up to three, charities for the advancement of religion came bottom of the list, chosen by a mere 2%. This proportion did not vary across demographic sub-groups.

The only other option to mention religion (albeit peripherally) was ‘the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity’. This scored 5% overall but was significantly more popular with Labour and Liberal Democrat voters than Conservatives.

Top of the list came charities for the advancement of health or the saving of lives (44%), for the assistance of those in need (32%), for the prevention or relief of poverty (19%), for animal welfare (19%), and for the promotion of the armed forces or emergency services (13%). Some of these charities will naturally have religious links or roots.

Full data tables from this poll are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-CharityTypes-081010.pdf

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

‘Aggressive Atheism’

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Many have judged the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Scotland and England to have been a relative success, but it was almost derailed at the eleventh hour by comments made by one of his closest aides, Cardinal Walter Kasper, in an interview with the German news magazine Focus, published on 13 September.

Kasper was widely quoted as making various seemingly disparaging remarks about the islands he was shortly to visit with the Pope, including references to a ‘third-world country’ in the grip of ‘aggressive neo-atheism’. Kasper was pulled from the papal entourage at the last minute, ostensibly on the grounds of his illness (gout).

In a YouGov poll conducted for The Sunday Times on 16-17 September among a representative online sample of 1,984 Britons aged 18 and over, respondents were asked what they thought about Kasper’s views. These questions do not seem to have been used in the printed edition of the newspaper, but the results are now available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-ST-results-170910.pdf

Putting on one side Kasper’s perceived experiences of landing at Heathrow Airport, with which many travellers might concur, 23% of interviewees agreed with him that aggressive neo-atheism is widespread in Britain, 37% disagreed, 25% were neutral and 16% expressed no opinion.

Those most likely to think that neo-atheism was taking root comprised men (27%), the over-60s (30%), Scots (29%) and Conservative voters (29%). The proportion fell to 16% among the 18-24s, but this was mainly because 54% of them were neutral or did not know. Disagreement was notably higher among the ABC1s than the C2DEs (non-manuals and manuals, respectively).

One of Britain’s most outspoken atheists, and probably to the fore of Kasper’s mind in making his comments, is Richard Dawkins. His was one of the names included in a separate YouGov survey of 3,161 adults on 24-26 August in which they were asked to decide who was a ‘national treasure’.

7% of the sample thought that Dawkins was definitely a national treasure, and a further 16% that he was admirable but not quite a national treasure. His admirers were especially to be found among Londoners (32%) and Liberal Democrats (30%). Another 30% were convinced that Dawkins was not a national treasure, while 38% did not know who he was and 9% had no opinion. Detailed results are at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-NationalTreasures-260810.pdf

Quantitative evidence about the extent of atheism in contemporary Britain is somewhat affected by definitional issues. Equating it with those who positively and consistently disbelieve in God, the number of atheists has risen from 10% in 1991 to 12% in 2000 to 18% in 2008, according to the British Social Attitudes Surveys. In 2008 atheists were disproportionately (23%) men or aged 18-34.

International survey findings are reviewed in Phil Zuckerman, ‘Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns’, in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 47-65.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Harvest Festivals

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Some form of public thanksgiving, secular or religious, for the successful bringing-in of the harvest can be traced back to pagan times in Britain. However, harvest festival services, in the sense with which most of us will be familiar from church or school, really caught on in the mid-nineteenth century.

Now the harvest tradition is probably slowly dying out. That, at least, is the conclusion being drawn by some commentators from a recent YouGov poll conducted online among 2,200 adults on behalf of the campaign group Eat Seasonably, which is funded by Defra, and aims to promote Britain’s seasonal produce of fruit and vegetables. It is hoping to reignite the fashion for harvest festivals.

Four-fifths of those interviewed by YouGov said that they no longer celebrated harvest festivals. Moreover, of the one-fifth doing so, less than one-third (29%) took solely fresh fruit or vegetables to church or school. One-half brought in only tinned or dried food, with 54% listing tinned baked beans as a staple offering.

A national survey early in 2009, commissioned to mark the launch of the TV channel Blighty, found similar results, with less than one-quarter of adults reporting that they attended harvest festivals.

In polls conducted for the Church of England attendance at harvest festival services during the past year was claimed by 20% of Britons in 2003, 24% in 2005 and 20% in 2007. As with all recalled religious practice, it is likely that these figures are somewhat inflated.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Sun Shines Some Light

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Clive D. Field

BRIN readers might not naturally think of The Sun, perhaps Britain’s most famous weekday tabloid newspaper, as a source of religious intelligence. However, as part of its polling contract with YouGov, it did add a couple of questions on topical issues to a survey conducted online on 20 September among a representative sample of 772 British adults aged 18 and over.

The first sought to quantify what is already being described as the ‘Benedict bounce’, following the recent papal visit to Britain. Respondents were asked whether, on the basis of what they had seen and heard, their opinion of the Pope had changed as a result of the visit. 15% said that their opinion had become more positive and 9% more negative. For 61% the visit had made no difference to their views, while 16% could not say. The positive impact of the visit on perceptions of the Pope was most evidenced among Conservative voters, the under-25s, and residents of London, the Midlands/Wales and Scotland (the three regions where the main events of the visit had been staged). The data tables can be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-PopesVisitReaction-results-200910.pdf

The second topic covered was that of halal meat, on the back of tabloid newspaper reports that restaurants and caterers are increasingly using halal products surreptitiously, without overtly telling their customers. 73% of Britons in The Sun poll thought that food providers should be required to label halal meat as such and 20% that they should not. The most notable demographic variation was by age, the under-25s (57%) being least insistent on labelling and the over-60s (81%) the most. This follows the general trend of questions relating to Muslim issues whereby younger people are more sympathetic than their elders. For the data tables, see:  

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-Halal_Food-results-200910.pdf

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Daybreak Surveys Religion

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Daybreak is the new breakfast television programme for the ITV network, anchored by Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley and launched on 6 September.

It has made an early entry into surveying public opinion by commissioning YouGov to run a poll on various aspects of religion.

Fieldwork was conducted online on 12-13 September among a representative sample of 2,108 adults aged 18 and over. Full data tabulations are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-DaybreakReligion-130910.pdf

Asked ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’, only 49% replied in the affirmative, which must be one of the lowest levels of religious affiliation ever recorded in British polling history. 45% said they did not belong to any religion.

The 49% certainly is in stark contrast to the figure of 82% obtained in the recently-published Citizenship Survey for 2008-09 in response to the question: ‘What is your religion even if you are not currently practising?’

Even allowing for variations in methodology and question-wording, a discrepancy of 33% between two surveys is huge, underlying the challenges in measuring this most basic dimension of religiosity. BRIN will return to this topic at a future date.

Women were more likely to profess a religion than men, older people rather than the young, the ABC1s more than the C2DEs, and Londoners more than the rest of the country.

The age effect was very marked. Whereas 60% of the over-60s were attached to a religion, the figure was only 36% for the 18-29s. Indeed, 20% more of the 18-29s did not belong to a religion than did, while for the over-60s 27% more belonged than not.

Among those who regarded themselves as belonging to a religion, a majority (55%) claimed to be Anglican, 18% Roman Catholic, 13% Free Church (including Presbyterian), 7% to belong to the major non-Christian faiths and 7% to other groups.

Most (78%) agreed that it was not necessary to attend religious services to be religious, although opinion was more balanced (38% agreeing, 34% disagreeing) when respondents were asked whether regular attenders were more religious than non-attenders.

Quizzed about marriage, just 3% opposed inter-faith marriage, most having no strong opinion on the subject. Of married persons, 55% had held the ceremony in a church, including 40% of those without a religion (albeit some unwillingly), and a further 13% would have liked to marry in church but had not.

Overall, in selecting a school for their children, few (9%) attached importance to the religion of the school, Catholics (36%) and Londoners (17%) being the main exceptions.   

68% agreed with the proposition that Christianity has been pushed to the sidelines in modern Britain. The figure was naturally highest for Christians (80%), but even 63% of those without a religion agreed.

Senior religious leaders (not specified in the question) were not respected by 56% of all adults, 20% more than held them in respect. For those with a religion, 53% held religious leaders in respect and 40% not, for those without a religion 20% and 73%.

27% considered that religious leaders spoke out too much about important issues affecting society, 19% the right amount and 35% too little. Those with a faith (43%) and the over-60s (40%) most wanted religious leaders to be more vociferous.

Asked about the papal visit, 17% supported it, 29% opposed it and 49% were neutral. Support was greatest among Catholics (54%) and opposition among those with no religion (37%).

79% (including 82% of Catholics, 83% of the over-40s and 85% of Scots) wanted the Pope to apologize for the sexual abuse of children perpetrated by Catholic priests.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Britons Respond to Pastor Jones

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The ninth anniversary of 9/11 was somewhat overshadowed by the crisis precipitated by Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville (Florida), who planned to mark the occasion by an ‘International burn a Koran’ day but, in the face of overwhelming opposition, called off the event at the last minute.

British public opinion on the subject was tested by YouGov as part of its regular weekly polling for the Sunday Times, although this particular question did not feature in the reporting in yesterday’s print edition of the newspaper. YouGov interviewed 1,858 adults aged 18 and over online on 9 and 10 September. The data table is available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-ST-results-100910.pdf

Respondents were asked whether the US government should or should not allow Pastor Jones to proceed with the ‘International burn a Koran’ day. It was not explained that, in practice, there was no legal basis on which the US government could have intervened, since Jones’s intended action was defensible under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

In reply, 24% of Britons thought that the US government should allow the burning to take place, citing Jones’s right to free expression. 65% wanted the US government to intercede on the grounds that Jones was inciting racial hatred. The remaining 11% expressed no view.

Those in favour of the US government standing aside were especially to be found among Conservative voters (29%) and men (31%). Jones’s opponents were most numerous with Labour voters (72%), Liberal Democrats (74%), women (69%) and the over-60s (72%).

In other British polls the elderly have usually been found to be the most Islamophobic of all age groups, so the finding from this particular survey is as interesting as it is unusual. Possibly, the over-60s were most fearful of the international consequences (in terms of protests and violence) had the Korans been burned.

The closest analogy to the incident in Britain is reaction to the international controversy surrounding the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper at the start of 2006. Several opinion polls were conducted on the issue.

British attitudes towards these cartoons were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, the principle of freedom of expression was deemed to justify their publication abroad. On the other, the decision of the British press not to republish them, out of respect for the Muslim community in Britain, was simultaneously supported, while the excesses of Muslim protests were roundly condemned.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

At Odds with the Church? Roman Catholic Opinion II

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Clive D. Field

As if the organizers of this week’s papal visit did not already have enough to worry about! More than three-quarters of the population apparently have no interest in the visit and oppose the state part-funding it out of taxpayers’ money, according to a recent ComRes/Theos poll (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=524).

Also, a combination of security, cost and travel considerations is causing grave concerns that attendance at the open-air events in Glasgow, London and Birmingham may be well under capacity. See, for example, the report in today’s edition of The Independent at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/administration-problems-blamed-for-pope-benedicts-ticket-slump-2077548.html

Now, hot on the heels of yesterday’s ComRes/BBC survey (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=554), which revealed doubts about the role of women in the Church and clerical celibacy, comes further evidence that Britain’s Catholics are ‘at odds with the Church’ over key aspects of its teaching. 

These new data are to be found in an online YouGov survey of 1,636 British Roman Catholics conducted for ITV in connection with a special edition of the Tonight programme on the papal visit, to be broadcast at 7.30 pm on ITV1 this Thursday, the first day of the visit, and fronted by Julie Etchingham. It will be entitled Keeping the Faith?

We will doubtless have to wait until after the broadcast for the full results from this YouGov poll to emerge, but initial findings have already appeared in a Press Association release, which is the basis of much reporting in today’s print, broadcast and online news media.

We summarize the available statistics here, giving, by way of comparison, the answers to similar questions in the survey of Roman Catholic opinion in England and Wales carried out by Gallup in 1978 on behalf of Michael Hornsby-Smith. On that occasion, 1,023 English and Welsh Catholics were interviewed face-to-face.

ABORTION

In the YouGov/ITV poll in 2010 only 11% of British Catholics agreed with the Church that abortion is solely permitted as an indirect consequence of life-saving treatment. A further 44% thought it should be sanctioned in cases of rape, incest and severe disability in the child. 30% believed that abortion should always be allowed, while just 6% were opposed to it under all circumstances.

In 1978 65% of English and Welsh Catholics agreed (and 24% disagreed) that, except where the life of the mother was at risk, abortion was wrong.

CONTRACEPTION

In 2010 a mere 4% of British Catholics agreed with the Church that contraception is wrong. 71% wanted to see it used more often to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. 23% considered that it is a matter for couples to decide whether to use contraception or not.

In 1978 74% of English and Welsh Catholics agreed (and 13% disagreed) that a married couple who felt they had as many children as they wanted did nothing wrong in using artificial means of birth control.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Only 11% of British Catholics in 2010 thought homosexuality to be morally wrong. 28% contended that adults should be free to do what they wish in their own homes. 41% wanted to see both gay and straight relationships celebrated.

In 1978 55% of English and Welsh Catholics agreed (and 17% disagreed) that the Church can never, in practice, approve of homosexual acts.

CLERICAL CELIBACY

Just 27% of British Catholics in 2010 supported continuing celibacy for priests. 65% thought that priests should be allowed to marry, 16% more than in yesterday’s ComRes/BBC poll (whose sample was only one-third of the size of YouGov’s).

In 1978 54% of English and Welsh Catholics were prepared to contemplate the possibility of married priests, as one solution to the shortage of priests.

SUMMARY

Variations in question-wording between the 1978 and 2010 surveys should make us circumspect about drawing too firm conclusions from a comparison. However, it seems evident that, on these four measures, the 1978 data already had the makings of a community at odds with the Church.

Perhaps the greatest shift in Catholic opinion on moral issues over the past thirty-two years has been in respect of abortion and homosexuality. In both cases this probably mirrors more liberal attitudes in society as a whole.

POSTSCRIPT [last revised 22 September] Topline results for all the questions in this survey for ITV, including four not featured above, have now been posted by YouGov at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-YouGovITV-PapalVisit-020910.pdf

In addition, five questions on abortion and contraception were included in the same survey on behalf of Marie Stopes International. Detailed results for these (disaggregated by mass attendance, gender, age, social grade and region) are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-MarieStopes-CatholicSample-020910.pdf

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Holocaust Education

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Policy-makers and older generations of Britons sometimes get worried that the Holocaust, and the events of the Second World War more generally, are fading from the public memory. Last year, for instance, there was extensive media coverage of a study by the London Jewish Cultural Centre and Miramax which revealed that many secondary school pupils did not know about Auschwitz, some even regarding it as a brand of beer.

Now YouGov has released the results of a survey it conducted on 1-2 July this year among 2,233 adults aged 18 and over drawn from its online panel. The poll asked about the importance of British schoolchildren learning about eleven periods and events in European history.

The Holocaust topped the list, 80% regarding it as very or fairly important that schoolchildren learn about it. Communism (72%) and Fascism (69%) came second and third, with the Enlightenment (45%) and German and Italian unification (41%) in the bottom two places. The Reformation scored 53%.

The importance attached to teaching about the Holocaust varied with age, from 69% among the 18-24s to 78% for the 25-39s, 83% for the 40-59s and 85% for those aged 60 and over. However, the youngest age cohort still attached the greatest significance to the Holocaust of all the periods and events on offer.

Women (83%) also deemed the Holocaust more important than men (77%) and the ABC1s (84%) more than the C2DEs (75%). Among voters, Liberal Democrats were most supportive (88%). At 82%, London and the rest of southern England regarded teaching of the Holocaust as a little more important than elsewhere in Britain.

The full results of the survey will be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-SchoolSubjectsEuropeanHistory-080910.pdf

The questions on European history formed part of the same poll which covered religious education, for which see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=512.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment