Theos Civil Unrest Survey

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Britain may be poised for a period of protest and civil unrest, according to a new survey by ComRes for Theos, the public theology think-tank, released on 3 March. Fieldwork was conducted online on 23-25 February 2011, among 2,003 adults aged 18 and over.

However, although 36% of all adults and 46% of the 18-24s exhibit a definite appetite to take direct action of some form, whether legal or illegal, in an effort to influence rules, laws or policies, religious liberty is the cause least likely to get citizens out on the metaphorical streets.

Given a list of ten issues which they might take direct action about, just 13% of interviewees picked religious liberty. This compared with 52% for fuel prices, 47% for public service cuts, 41% for tax rises, 35% for bank bonuses, 33% for the threat of losing one’s job, 25% for tax-avoidance by businesses, 19% for global poverty, 19% for student fees, and 17% for climate change. Short-term material concerns thus appear to have won out over moral agendas.

The sub-samples most exercised about religious liberty were the top (AB) social group (20%) and the over-65s (18%). Those least interested were 18-24s (6%), skilled manual workers (7%) and residents of Wales and South-West England (8%).

People concerned about religious liberty were found to prefer traditional methods of protest (such as signing a petition, lobbying a politician or wearing a campaign badge) rather than newer mechanisms (such as social media).

Respondents were also asked about their belief in God. 23% said that they did not believe in God; 19% that they did not know whether there is a God but there was no means of finding out; 17% had doubts but on balance did believe in God; 15% were convinced that God really exists and had no doubts; 13% disbelieved in a personal God but did believe in a higher power; and 10% believed in God some of the time but not at other times.

Combining the last four categories, we arrive at a figure of 55% for those who believed in God or a life force, but not necessarily without doubts or all of the time. The highs were 61% for women, 64% for the over-65s and 63% for residents of the South-East; the lows were 48% among men and 49% with the 18-24s. Outright disbelievers were especially concentrated in the 18-24 age cohort (33%).

The God question replicated the one used in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Surveys. When this had first been put by BSA, in 1991, 74% believed, on this rather generous definition. The number was still 72% in 1998 but had fallen to 62% by 2008.  

A final ComRes question about religious affiliation revealed that 33% of Britons espouse no religion, 58% profess to be Christian and 7% to subscribe to other belief systems. Irreligion is most prevalent among the young (52% with the 18-24s, 44% with the 25-34s) and least likely to be found among the over-65s (19%).

A summary of the ComRes/Theos research is available at:

http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/Civil_Unrest_Summary_of_research_findings_final.doc

and the full data tables at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/page165774311.aspx

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Ethnic Minority British Election Study 2009-2010 now online

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Siobhan McAndrew

The British Election Study (BES) constitutes the longest academic series of nationally representative probability sample surveys in Britain. In 1997, Anthony Heath and Shamit Saggar led an investigation into ethnic minority electoral behaviour and attitudes via a booster sample of 705 respondents. A survey of ethnic minorities in 2010 was also run, and this week was made available online at http://bes2009-10.org/

Anthony Heath, Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester, led the project alongside Steve Fisher (Oxford) and David Sanders (Essex). He says: “in some respects EMBES is the most comprehensive study of ethnic minorities in Britain since PSI’s Fourth National Survey in 1994”.

EMBES is primarily concerned with political party preference, vote choice in 2010, attitudes towards the main party leaders and so forth – but also includes questions on topics such as language fluency, perceptions of discrimination in different fields, cultural orientations, social relationships and social capital.

Some of the questions are replicated from those in the 1997 ethnic minority survey, others from the post-election main BES survey, and others still from the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey – allowing different comparisons to be made.

The EMBES comprises reasonably-large sample sizes covering important ethnic minority groups in Britain. 1 respondent refused to report their ethnicity; otherwise:
Mixed white and Black Caribbean – 70 respondents
Mixed white and Black African – 23
Mixed white and Asian – 5
Other mixed – 9
Asian or British Indian – 587
Asian or British Pakistani – 668
Asian or British Bangladeshi – 270
Other Asian/British – 16
Black or Black British Caribbean – 597
Black or Black British African – 524
Other Black British background – 6
Other ethnic group – 11
Total: 2787

A small number of religious items were included in the questionnaire:
Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?

If yes, which one? (Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Other)

Which Christian denomination or tradition do you belong to? (Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Other [write in], None in particular)

If Muslim, which Muslim tradition do you belong to? (Sunni [Hanafi; Deobandi; Barelvi], Shi’a (Twelvers; Severners; Ismailis; Boras), Sufism, Kharijites: Ibadism, Ahmadis, None of these, Other [write in])

How important is your religion to you?

In the past 12 months, how often did you participate in religious activities or attend religious services or meetings with other people, other than for events such as weddings and funerals?

In the past 12 months, how often did you do religious activities on your own? This may include prayer, meditation and other forms of worship taking place at home or in any other location.

The questionnaire is available here:
http://bes.utdallas.edu/2009/embes/EMBES_questionnaire_FINAL.pdf

And the datasets are available in SPSS and Stata format here :
http://bes.utdallas.edu/2009/embes.php

The documentation for the survey, however, is not available yet, so I will check how to weight the sample before reporting any further data. For additional information on EMBES, contact David Sanders at the University of Essex.

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Costing the Heavens

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The National Secular Society (NSS) claimed on Monday that its study of expenditure on hospital chaplaincy by NHS provider trusts in England had demonstrated that the service yields no clinical benefit.

The NSS press release and accompanying 12-page report, written by Robert Christian (a member of both the NSS and the British Humanist Association) and entitled Costing the Heavens, can be downloaded from:

http://www.secularism.org.uk/study-shows-that-spending-on-hos.html

By means of an enquiry under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, the NSS asked all 227 English NHS provider trusts (both acute/specialist and mental health) in August and September 2010 how much they had spent on chaplaincy services in the financial year 2009/10. There was a 100% response. Ambulance trusts and primary care trusts were out of scope (since they do not generally provide inpatient services).

The NSS then compared the percentage of each trust’s total income spent on chaplaincy services with the trust’s performance on the Care Quality Commission’s Standards for Better Health and the Standardised Mortality Ratio (the latter applicable to acute trusts only).

These measures represent the appropriate national quality benchmarks of health outcomes for 2009/10, although, as NSS acknowledges, they have been criticized as methodologically limited.

Total direct (pay and non-pay) expenditure on chaplaincy services was £29 million. Where like-for-like comparisons were possible, this was an average (inflation-beating) 7% above the figure obtained by the NSS in a comparable study published in April 2009, which remains available at:

http://www.secularism.org.uk/nhs-chaplaincy-funding.html

However, ‘statistical analysis showed that there was no relationship or positive correlation between how much hospitals spent on chaplaincy services and the overall quality of their patient care.’ These findings are visualized in graphs 2-4 of the report.

There were wide variations in the proportions that similar hospitals spent on chaplaincy (graph 1), and the NSS calculated (tables 1-2) that, if all NHS trusts brought their spending into line with the best-performing trusts, annual savings of £18.6 million would be made. This sum, according to NSS, would pay for 1,000 nursing assistants or a brand new community hospital every year.

Commenting on the results, Keith Porteous Wood (NSS Executive Director) said: ‘The National Secular Society is not seeking to oust chaplains from hospitals, but their cost should not be borne by public funds, especially when clinical services for patients are being cut.’

‘We have proposed that chaplaincy services should be paid for through charitable trusts, supported by churches and their parishioners. If churches really support “the big society” then they will stop siphoning off NHS cash to fund chaplains’ salaries.’

It is unclear how this NSS survey relates (if at all) to another recent study, also based on data obtained under FoI, reported in the Daily Express which produced an estimated expenditure of £30 million on hospital chaplaincy in England in 2009/10. See our coverage at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=884

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Feeling Lucky

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Luck could be said to form part of the religious continuum (well, just about). It is accordingly defined in Wikipedia as ‘good or bad fortune in life caused by accident or chance, and attributed by some to reasons of faith or superstition, which happens beyond a person’s control’.

In recent years the phenomenon of luck has been most studied in this country by Professor Richard Wiseman, a professional magician turned psychologist who works at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of such best-selling books as The Luck Factor: Change Your Luck, and Change Your Life (London: Century, 2002) and The Little Book of Luck (London: Arrow, 2004).

Luck has mainly found its way into surveys of public opinion in terms of questions about belief in specific objects or situations as being inherently lucky or unlucky, usually within the broader context of superstition. For example, some trend data on belief in lucky charms or mascots will be found on the BRIN website at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/luckycharmbelief.xls

Now YouGov has turned its attention to quantifying people’s perceptions of ‘luckiness’, in a poll of 1,975 Britons aged 18 and over interviewed online on 22 and 23 February 2011. The table of results is available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-Lucky-230211.pdf

34% of respondents considered themselves to be lucky and 21% unlucky, with the biggest single category (43%) thinking they were neither lucky nor unlucky. A mere 2% had no views on the matter, an incredibly low proportion of don’t knows in comparison to most religion-related surveys.

All demographic groups showed a margin of the lucky over the unlucky, but the gap varied in size. It was at its greatest (+28%) among the over-60s and Liberal Democrat voters, and at its narrowest among those aged 40-59 (+4%), northerners (+4%) and Scots (+5%).

Aggregate believers in luckiness or unluckiness were 55%, rising to 62% among the 18-24s, for whom good or bad luck seems almost to be a kind of surrogate faith.

For this reason, the number unwilling to categorize themselves as either lucky or unlucky dipped to 33% among the 18-24s, but for all other groups it fluctuated within a fairly tight range of 39% to 47%.

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National Jewish Student Survey

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The National Jewish Student Survey, a large-scale enquiry into Jewish identity, was launched on Tuesday last week. It has been commissioned by UJS Hillel, a support organization for Jewish students in the UK since 1953, with a view to informing its future policy and programme, and to influencing the ways in which Jewish community organizations relate to Jewish students.

More specifically, the survey ‘investigates the relationship between Jewish students’ upbringing and their attitudes, beliefs, activities and aspirations. In particular, it explores their community affiliations (synagogue, school, youth movements), their social lives, their perspectives on what being Jewish means, and their overall experience of being Jewish on campus today.’

Funding and other backing for the research is coming from the Pears Foundation, UJIA (United Jewish Israel Appeal), the Rothschild Foundation (Europe) and the Maurice Wold Charitable Foundation.

The project is being undertaken for UJS Hillel by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), in two stages. The quantitative phase is already running, throughout February and March, with an online questionnaire administered by Ipsos MORI and available at:

http://surveys.ipsosinteractive.com/wix/p866086804.aspx

Eligibility to participate in the online survey is restricted to people who are Jewish (not defined) and currently registered to study full- or part-time at a UK university or college (including those who are temporarily abroad as part of their course or whose main place of study is outside the UK).

In practice, the online sample will be self-selecting, and weighting may present a challenge. Some verification of respondents is offered by the requirement, before completing the questionnaire, to submit an email address in order for a unique survey link to be sent by Ipsos MORI.

The qualitative phase comprises focus groups in the UK, which will take place in April. The final report, which will be authored entirely by JPR, is expected to be issued in autumn 2011.

The National Jewish Student Survey is being inaugurated just as the University of Derby’s Religion and Belief in Higher Education Project (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=684) is nearing its end. That, presumably, will also have captured some Jewish student opinion and experience.

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Getting Ahead in Life

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The traditional annual volume derived from the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey was published by Sage just before Christmas. Edited by Alison Park, John Curtice, Elizabeth Clery and Catherine Bryson, The 27th Report: Exploring Labour’s Legacy was based on the 2009 survey, undertaken by Natcen between June and November that year.

Unlike the 2008 survey (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=66), which was full of religious content, the 2009 study does not immediately appear to afford such a rich mine of information. Nevertheless, it is not without value for religion-related research.

The full sample, comprising 3,421 adult Britons aged 18 and over interviewed face-to-face, was asked the usual questions about religious affiliation and attendance. These are important both in their own right and as variables for analysing the more ‘secular’ questions.

Of particular interest is the fact that, for the first time in the history of BSA, a slim majority of respondents claimed to have no religion when asked ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’

In reply, 51% self-identified as having no religion. This compares with 31% when the question was first put in 1983. The 40% barrier was not broken until 1995. The proportion was 46% in 2007 and 43% in 2008.

Of the 49% with a current religion, the principal categories were Anglican (20%), Christian – unspecified denomination (9%), Roman Catholic (9%), and non-Christian (5%).

There can be little doubt that many individuals had become less religious over time. For instance, just 19% had been brought up without a religion, 32% less than said they had no religion in 2009. Similarly, 38% had been reared as Anglicans, almost double the number who were still Anglican in 2009.

Of those with a religion, only one in ten attended services connected with it weekly or more often, and 48% never or practically never went to their place of worship.

The main sample was also asked about groups and organizations, besides parents, who should ensure children live safely without suffering abuse or neglect. Unsurprisingly, social services (66%), schools (53%) and extended families (52%) topped the list.

Yet the very low score for religious groups (2%) was somewhat unexpected, apparently suggesting the poor public image of religious social work, doubtless not unrelated to widespread knowledge of sexual abuse of children at the hands of some Roman Catholic clergy.

As well as the face-to-face interview, respondents were invited to tackle a self-completion questionnaire. There were three versions of this, corresponding to three sub-samples into which the main sample was evenly divided.

Version A of the self-completion questionnaire incorporated a special module on inequality as part of an International Social Survey Program extension. The first question in this asked about opportunities for getting ahead in life and was answered by 958 individuals.

In reply, 9% said that a person’s religion was essential or very important in getting ahead in life, rather more than when the question was previously put, in 1987 (5%) and 1992 (3%). By 2009 religion had even assumed greater importance on this definition than race/ethnicity and gender (8% each).

But, in terms of ascriptive factors, religion was not considered as quite so essential or very important as coming from a wealthy family (14%) or having well-educated parents (31%).

It was also dwarfed by meritocratic factors such as hard work (84%), good education (74%) and ambition (71%), and by the non-meritocratic factor of knowing the right people (33%).

The full spread of responses for the importance of a person’s religion in getting ahead in life was: essential 3%, very important 6%, fairly important 10%, not very important 27%, not important at all 52%, cannot choose 2%, and not answered 1%.

There is a brief analysis of the getting ahead in life question in chapter 2 (pages 29-50) of The 27th Report: Exploring Labour’s Legacy, by Anthony Heath, Nan Dirk de Graaf and Yaojun Li on ‘How Fair is the Route to the Top? Perceptions of Social Mobility’.

The annotated questionnaire for the 2009 British Social Attitudes Survey will be found at:

http://www.natcen.ac.uk/media/606622/bsa%202009%20annotated%20questionnaires.pdf

POSTSCRIPT [23 February 2011]: The dataset for the survey has just been released at ESDS as SN 6695.

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Civil Partnerships

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Clive D. Field

According to a new YouGov poll, public opinion is divided about the Coalition Government’s plans, announced by the Equalities Office on 17 February, to permit civil partnerships in England and Wales to be celebrated in religious buildings, even though ‘no religious group will be forced to host a civil partnership registration’.

Government’s goal would be achieved through implementation of Section 202 of the Equality Act 2010, which revokes the explicit ban on holding civil partnership registrations in religious premises that stems from the Approved Premises (Marriage and Civil Partnership) Regulations 2005. The Section is not yet in force.

The YouGov survey was undertaken online for The Sunday Times on 17 and 18 February 2011, among a representative sample of 2,464 adult Britons aged 18 and over. The results of the study will be found on page 10 of the tables at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-ST-results-18-200211.pdf

Asked whether it should be legal for same-sex couples to hold their civil partnership ceremonies in places of worship, 42% agreed (similar to the 41% approving of same-sex marriage, in a different question), 43% disagreed, and 16% expressed no opinion.

Support for the Government’s proposal was notably strong among Liberal Democrat voters (50%) and those aged 25-39 (53%), presumably the age group most likely to be directly affected.

Opposition peaked at 60% among the over-60s and at 54% among Conservative voters, despite the Conservative Party being the major partner in the Coalition Government which is putting forward the idea.

Men were also 10 points more hostile to the plan than women, and manual workers less in favour than non-manuals. Regional differences were not marked. In Scotland, which is not affected (since this is a devolved matter), the split was 42% versus 41%.

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Hospital Chaplaincy

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Daily Express recently ran a story headlined ‘NHS spends £25m on clergymen while hard-up hospitals have to shut wards’. Written by Victoria Fletcher, the newspaper’s health editor, the article is available online at:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/227562/NHS-spends-25m-on-clergymen-while-hard-up-hospitals-have-to-shut-wards-

It is based upon a Freedom of Information (FoI) request sent to each of England’s 226 mental health and acute hospital trusts, of which 200 replied.

Responding trusts said they spent £25,556,000 on chaplaincy services in 2009 and 2010 (I am assuming that this figure refers to a single financial year, rather than the aggregate of two calendar years).

Roughly, this equated to an average of £125,000 per trust, mostly for the salaries of clerics from the Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faiths. Scaling up for non-responding trusts, the newspaper calculated an annual bill of nearly £30 million in England.

Guys and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust in London was the highest spender, with a chaplaincy budget of £434,000. In Leicester the University Hospitals NHS Trust spent £341,000 on 16 part-time chaplains.

Fletcher claims that ‘the sums being spent are up to eight per cent higher than in the previous financial year’, although it is not explained how this finding relates to an earlier (but evidently broader) survey of NHS chaplaincy published by the National Secular Society (NSS) in April 2009.

The NSS also used FoI to obtain figures on chaplaincy costs incurred by mental health and care trusts, NHS and foundation trusts and primary care trusts in England.

It likewise received a partial response, with £26,722,000 spent on the salaries of 546 full-time equivalent chaplains in England. The total for the UK was £32,014,000 which was further increased by NSS, to £40 million, by factoring in non-salary costs.

Reports from this previous NSS study are still available at:

http://www.secularism.org.uk/nhs-chaplaincy-funding.html

The new data in the Daily Express will doubtless reignite the controversy about who should pay for chaplaincy services, especially at a time of pressure on the health budget – the NHS or religious bodies.  

For those wishing to know more, there is a considerable literature on hospital chaplaincy, including the important recent book by Christopher Swift, Hospital Chaplaincy in the Twenty-First Century: the Crisis of Spiritual Care on the NHS (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

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Will Jesus Christ Return to Earth?

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Only 3% of Britons believe that Jesus Christ will return to earth before 2050, according to a YouGov poll reissued in connection with the general release in the UK this Friday of the film Never Let Me Go, which tackles the controversial topic of cloning. The prophecy of His return is otherwise known as the Second Coming, Second Advent or Parousia.

The survey was actually conducted on 12-13 August 2010, among a representative sample of 1,865 adults aged 18 and over, interviewed online. Respondents were shown a random selection of 20 predictions of things which might happen in the next 40 years, from a total list of 40 scenarios. The data tables are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-LikelyToHappen-130810.pdf

The Second Coming of Christ was the prediction thought to be least likely to come true, with 84% saying that it would probably or definitely not happen by 2050 and 13% uncertain. The 3% of people confident that Jesus would return to earth in this timeframe ranged from 1% in Scotland to 5% in London and Southern England.

The next most implausible scenarios were that: most car owners would own flying cars within 40 years, believed by 8%; an asteroid would hit earth, causing massive loss of life (12%); and the death penalty would be reintroduced into Britain (15%).

At the other end of the spectrum, three-quarters or more were convinced that, by 2050, the world would face an energy crisis, the earth would get warmer, a woman would become prime minister, and most Britons would have to work into their 70s before retiring.

The only comparator survey which I can find of the general population of Great Britain was conducted by Gallup in November 1999. Asked whether Christ would return to earth one day for a Second Coming, 25% agreed that He would, including 30% of women and of those aged 45-64, 32% of semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, and 37% of the over-65s.

In the United States, by contrast, 41% of adults thought that Christ definitely or probably would return to earth before 2050, according to a Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine study in April 2010, with 46% certain He would not and 13% expressing no views.

An earlier Pew poll in July 2006 found that 79% of American Christians believed in the Second Coming, albeit only 20% that He would return to earth in their lifetime.

One other prediction of potential interest to BRIN readers was included in last August’s YouGov investigation. Just 15% considered it likely that we would make contact with alien life by 2050, 71% saying that it definitely or probably would not happen. Men (20%) and Liberal Democrat voters (25%) were most open to the possibility.

At the same time, 47% thought there was a chance that we would discover evidence of life elsewhere in the universe during the next 40 years.

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Inter-Faith Adoption

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Inter-faith adoption of children is acceptable to two-thirds of Britons, according to a YouGov poll released today. 2,051 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed online on 2-3 February 2011. The results are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-Adoption-080211.pdf

Asked whether, assuming they were well-qualified in all other ways, adoption by a couple of a different religion to the child being adopted should be allowed, 65% of respondents said yes and 14% no, with 21% unsure.

The proportion in favour of adoption under such circumstances was especially high (73%) in the case of those aged 18-24 and Scottish residents. It was lowest among the over-60s (59%), 17% of whom were opposed, the same figure as for those who voted Conservative at the 2010 general election.

Interviewees were more comfortable about adoption by a couple of a different religion to the child than by people over the age of 60 (16%), smokers (44%), people over the age of 50 (46%), gays and lesbians (53%), single persons (53%), and those on very low incomes (53%). But support was less than for adoption by unmarried couples (73%) and couples from a different racial background to the child being adopted (77%).

The number negative about inter-faith adoption was the smallest for the nine adoption scenarios apart from adoption by a couple of a child from a different racial background, which was only 11%. Opposition was strongest (64%) to adoption by people over the age of 60.

The results partly serve as a proxy for a fair degree of racial and religious tolerance in Britain but to the persistence of some other social prejudices. However, one suspects that the findings may have differed somewhat had questioning been about adoption by members of specific religious groups.

It should be noted that the poll did not directly touch upon one of the adoption issues which has been making serious running in recent years, the sensitivities of some persons of faith about adoption by homosexual couples, and about the expectation on other adopting couples to lack bias against homosexuality, in the face of the requirements of equality legislation.

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