UK Religious Trends to 2020

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Some fascinating (but necessarily speculative) insights into ten key current religious, demographic and other changes in the UK and their potential impact upon the Churches are contained in a new publication by Peter Brierley, head of Brierley Consultancy.

Entitled Major UK Religious Trends, 2010 to 2020, the 80-page paper is a companion to the same author’s Global Religious Trends, 2010 to 2020, which we covered on BRIN last year – see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=61

The report is designed to facilitate strategy formation and leadership development in the Churches, to ensure that their forward thinking and planning are fully grounded in the facts and reasonable assumptions.

Brierley is a statistician with 43 years’ experience of Christian evaluation, research and publishing, including lengthy spells as European Director of MARC Europe and Executive Director of Christian Research.

In his new paper he draws extensively on the empirical data which he collected in these roles, especially in undertaking church censuses and preparing successive editions of Religious Trends, to arrive at informed projections about the state of UK religion in 2020.

Brierley also utilizes the research which he has been conducting for a new book on Church Statistics, 2005-2015, to be released by ADBC Publishers (Brierley Consultancy’s new imprint) later this year.

This last-named publication is billed as giving data across all 340 denominations in the UK and will thus stand in the tradition of Religious Trends, a title that might be said to have moved off in a somewhat different direction in its new online manifestation from Christian Research (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=815).

The continuing eclipse of the Judeo-Christian heritage and the decline of institutional Christianity, with some pockets of trend-bucking (such as Pentecostals and larger Anglican places of worship), is the overarching (albeit nuanced) theme which unifies Brierley’s projections to 2020 in Major UK Religious Trends.

This story-line is neatly summarized in figure 6.5 on page 53, which compares the religious structure of Great Britain (rather than the UK) in 2010 and 2020.

By the latter date the Christian and non-Christian communities are estimated to balance at 50% each (with 41% professing no religion and 9% – although 12% is cited elsewhere – being of non-Christian faiths).

Among the 50% of professing Christians in 2020, just 4% will be regular churchgoers (highest in Scotland and lowest in Wales) and 46% irregular churchgoers or non-attenders. Weekday services will account for half of these worshippers.

Church membership is anticipated by Brierley to be 6% (or 7% elsewhere), the majority of it nominal.

These decreases in religious practice and affiliation are further accentuated when set against the background of a modest rise in religious provision, reflected in the forecast growth in the number of UK clergy from 36,630 in 2010 to 38,800 in 2020 and of places of worship from 50,700 to 51,900.

Figure 6.5 is complemented by table 1.12 on pages 18-19 which lists 22 quantitative and qualitative attributes of what the UK Christian scene might look like in 2020.

Brierley’s forecasts about church attendance contrast with the more cautiously optimistic reading of the contemporary situation promulgated by Christian Research since last September. Christian Research is hoping to organize a new UK-wide census of churchgoing and Christian activities this year, utilizing online data capture.

As with much of his previous work, Brierley seems to be on surest ground when writing about Trinitarian Christian denominations. Non-Trinitarian Churches and, more particularly, non-Christian faiths may be thought a little beyond his professional experience and perhaps even comfort zone.

Certainly, some of the statistics relating to non-Christian faiths, and Islam in particular, could be questioned. For example, Brierley’s estimate of Muslims has been scaled back to reflect the fact that (in his view) only half are ‘active members’, whereas the Citizenship Surveys demonstrate that four-fifths of Muslims claim to practice their religion.   

Major UK Religious Trends costs £15.00 inclusive of postage and can be ordered from Dr Peter Brierley, The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. Cheques should be made payable to Peter Brierley.

Posted in church attendance, Measuring religion, News from religious organisations | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

CofE Annual Church Statistics

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Siobhan McAndrew

We have recently heard from the Revd. Preb. Lynda Barley, who is Head of Research and Statistics at the Church of England (for those of you with a subscription, Church Times interviewed her in 2008 about her dual career as statistician and cleric).

The annual Church Statistics have in recent years been available to view online. The Church of England website is currently being revamped, so that only the current edition is readily viewable, although the press releases remain for earlier years.

However, there is a programme underway to update and enhance the materials that were previously available. The Research and Statistics area of the website is now available at http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics.aspx.

Over the next few months the Research and Statistics team anticipate not only replacing the information previously available, with improved tables and charts, but also adding additional related material.

In particular, they are planning to enhance the mapping of Church of England data that has been incorporated to a limited extent in the past.

Feedback on the website as it improves will be welcome, via statistics [dot] unit [at] churchofengland [dot] org.

Posted in church attendance, Measuring religion, News from religious organisations, Religion Online | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Churches and New Media Use

Posted on February 4, 2011 by sarabatts

Sara Batts, a PhD student at Loughborough University, introduces her findings on churches and new media use.

I am just beginning my fourth year of what I hope will be a five-year project. I’m based at Loughborough, but work in London with a full-time day job as a researcher for a City law firm. It’s the way information is handled online by churches that is of interest to me, and this sparked enough of a curiosity to embark on a research degree.

The key questions that I am addressing in the project are:

  • Are English churches establishing their own individual web presence, and then using online tools?
  • Is this having any influence on, or being influenced by, traditional hierarchies within church organisations?

The first major work was to establish a baseline of how many churches have a findable website. I then followed my sample through over two years to see how the numbers changed.

I took a sample of English churches from four major denominations – Church of England, Baptist, Methodist and Roman Catholic. I used the website Findachurch.co.uk and with permission polled its database using random numbers to represent the database index entries. In this way I could create a list that was not biased by geography – other online church-finding websites depended on using a postcode as an index. Given the vastly different proportions of church denominations in England, having 100 of each allowed for relatively straightforward comparisons. It means that Church of England churches are under-sampled and the others are over-represented, but this is preferable to having wildly varying numbers that would be needed for a proportional sample.

I either followed links from the findachurch.co.uk site or I used Google to search, and looked at the first two pages of results. Other studies have shown that that is consistent with most people’s real search techniques. Over two years, the percentage of churches I found websites for are as follows.

So the number of church sites I could find has been increasing, but increasing at different rates for different denominations. I have not yet established why.

The other key piece of desk research from last year was a content analysis of 147 church websites, from the area roughly equivalent to the Diocese of Chelmsford. I classified over 1,000 external hyperlinks and found that there were clear patterns of links. Christian Aid, Rejesus.co.uk and the Alpha Course were the three most linked-to independent organisations.

There were many more categories and types of information and the analysis is ongoing. It’s worth noting that although I collected data on photographs and some basic design elements (was navigation on the site straightforward?) this project is definitely not concerned with overall design choices, rather the information content on the sites.

I am moving into the next – and final – phase of data collection now and away from my desk. I will be interviewing leaders about their choices of online media, about their websites and the thinking behind them. From my desk I have been able to answer some of the ‘what’ questions in my research, now I hope to tackle the ‘why’ questions.

I blog about the PhD at http://phdinprogress.wordpress.com and aim to be posting content analysis results in late spring. 

Posted in Measuring religion, Religion Online, Research note | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Future of the Global Muslim Population

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The long-awaited Pew report on The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030 was eventually published yesterday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The Forum, based in Washington DC, is a non-partisan organization delivering timely and impartial information on issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. It is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

This report on Muslim population is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, jointly funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.

The next documents in the series will be on the number of Christians (to be published later this year) and (in 2012) projections for the future growth of Christianity and other world faiths and of the religiously unaffiliated.

The study of Muslim populations covers 232 countries and territories (including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man), so it is obviously not going to be possible to summarize it succinctly here. Rather, we shall concentrate on the UK data.

Estimates (the medium of three scenarios) of the number of self-identifying Muslims are provided for 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020 and 2030.

Projected figures for each country derive from the application of the well-established cohort-component method to the best available data on fertility, mortality and migration rates, and on related factors such as education, economic well-being and birth control.

The principal sources of the UK information are stated in Appendix B as: ‘1990 estimate based on World Religion Database; 2000 estimate based on 2001 Census; 2010, 2020 and 2030 projections carried out by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis based on the 2001 Census’ (p. 202).

The Institute referred to is located in Laxenburg, Austria, and a number of scholars from it are listed in Appendix C as consultants in respect of the UK: Bilal Barakat, Anne Goujon, Samir KC, Vegard Skirbekk and Marcin Stonawski. Other advisers on the UK were Erik Kaufmann (England) and Erling Lundevaller (Sweden).

The overall size of the UK Muslim population is estimated at 1,172,000 in 1990 (equivalent to 2.0% of all citizens) and 1,590,000 in 2000 (2.7%). The former figure seems somewhat high but is not drastically out of line with other estimates (largely ethnically-derived), while the latter is from the 2001 census, the first in Britain to include a question on religious profession.

The Pew estimate for 2010 is 2,869,000 (4.6% of the UK population). This has been arrived at through the cohort-component method (p. 174). As BRIN noted when this figure was given a preliminary airing by Pew on 16 September last (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=598), it seems a little inflated.

A subsequent BRIN calculation based on the Integrated Household Survey for 2009-10, which interviewed 442,000 individuals in Britain, suggested that there are roughly 2,520,000 Muslims at present (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=603).

For a more definitive answer, we shall obviously have to await the results from this year’s census, which will be taken on 27 March, and will again run a (voluntary) question about religious affiliation.

Clearly, if Pew’s 2010 figure is somewhat inflated, this will presumably have impacted on its projections for 2020 and 2030, which could be unduly high. They are, respectively, 4,231,000 (6.5% of the population) and 5,567,000 (8.2%).

The projected UK percentage for 2030 is lower than for France (10.3%), Belgium (10.2%), Sweden (9.9%), Austria (9.3%) and the Western European average (8.6%), but higher than in Switzerland (8.1%), The Netherlands (7.8%), Germany (7.1%), Italy (5.4%) and Spain (3.7%).  

The anticipated rise in the number of UK Muslims between 2010 and 2030 is thus 94%, compared with 145% between 1990 and 2010. Despite this lessening in the rate of growth, the projected UK increase for 2010-30 is still almost three times the global and European figures (35% and 32% respectively).

One of the factors behind the expansion in the Muslim community relative to the non-Muslim population is the higher fertility of the former (3.0 children per woman in the UK in 2005-10) than the latter (1.8).

Although Muslim fertility is declining, and the gap on non-Muslims is narrowing, it is still expected to be 0.8 children per woman in 2025-30 compared with 1.2 in 2005-10.

Greater fertility is linked to the younger age profile of Muslims, meaning that they are disproportionately already in or entering the prime reproductive years (ages 15-29).

Another reason for Muslim growth in the UK is net migration. The net inflow of Muslim immigrants in 2010 is estimated by Pew at 64,000, representing 28% of all immigrants to the UK in the year. There were 70,000 in Spain, 66,000 in France and 60,000 in Italy.

However, the five-year projected Muslim net migration into the UK is set to fall, according to Pew, from 312,000 in 2010-15 to 274,000 in 2025-30.  

No allowance seems to have been made for conversions to Islam, about which we made a post recently (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=813). Pew’s working hypothesis is that ‘future conversions into Islam will roughly equal conversions away from Islam’ (p. 166).

Needless to say, projections such as these could be overturned in the event of unanticipated changes in national or global social, economic or political conditions. Therefore, they should be treated with some discretion.

The 221-page report is available in both hypertext and PDF formats, alongside an interactive map and sortable data tables, thereby providing a truly flexible online resource. All these components can be accessed by following the links at the executive summary page:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth

To view the report alone as a PDF file, go to:

http://features.pewforum.org/FutureGlobalMuslimPopulation-WebPDF.pdf

Pew’s research will inevitably fuel the debates about immigration and Islamophobia in the UK. Early off the starting-block is the article in today’s Daily Mail which claims that by 2030 ‘Britain would have more Muslims than Kuwait and close to the number found in America, even though five times as many people live there’. See:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351251/Number-British-Muslims-double-5-5m-20-years.html

Posted in Historical studies, Measuring religion, News from religious organisations, Religion in public debate | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Declining Faith in Scotland?

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The correspondence columns of The Scotsman may seem an unlikely venue for a debate on religious statistics, but the issue of 3 January contained an interesting letter from Professor Callum Brown of the University of Dundee about the decline of faith in Scotland during recent years. The letter will be found at:

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/opinion/Letter-Declining-faith.6677614.jp

In it Brown, a leading academic exponent of secularization and author of the standard monograph on the social history of modern Scottish religion, compared religious profession in Scotland in 2001 (from the decennial census of population) with the Scottish Household Survey for 2008 (presumably, Brown was using only the second half of the data for that particular survey which actually fielded throughout 2007 and 2008).

‘The position has changed significantly’ between the two dates, Brown wrote. In the space of these seven years, affiliation to Christianity in Scotland dropped from 65% to 57%, principally as the result of falling allegiance to the Church of Scotland (down from 42% to 35%) and to the other Christian category (which declined from 14% to 9%). Roman Catholic identification remained stable at about 15%, while those claiming no religion increased from 28% in 2001 to 40% in 2008, virtually by 2% each year.

Brown made the important point that the question-wording used on both occasions was identical (‘What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?’), thereby implying his confidence that he was comparing like with like. It is a well-known fact that investigation of religious affiliation is especially sensitive to the precise formulation of the question.

Brown’s 2001 figures appear to be calculated on a base which included those who declined to answer the voluntary question about current religion, of whom there were 278,000 in Scotland. If these are removed from the base, then the proportion of Christians in Scotland in 2001 rose to 69%.

Such a calculation enables comparison with the Scottish data from the Integrated Household Survey for 2009-10. 72% of the 55,000 Scots interviewed then answered Christian in response to the question ‘What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?’

Some might superficially interpret this result as an increase rather than a decrease in Christian allegiance in Scotland since 2001. 25% of Scots said that they had no religion in 2009-10, with a wide geographical variation – from 8% in Inverclyde to 38% in Midlothian.

Another recent source is an Opinion Research Business poll in 2010. This asked a more normally-sized (1,000) representative sample of adult Scots ‘Which religion, if any, do you regard yourself as belonging to?’ 69% said Christian (including 53% Church of Scotland) and 28% no religion, with just 1% refusing to reply. Fractionally more (70%) said that they regarded themselves as a Christian and 26% not (excluding the 2% non-Christians).

The reality is, therefore, somewhat complex, possibly more so than Brown would like to admit. It will be interesting to see what results emerge from the 2011 census of religious profession in Scotland.

In the meantime, a year-by-year analysis of all the religious affiliation data in the Scottish Household Survey from 1999 to the present would be beneficial and would at least confirm whether Brown’s 2008 findings followed a consistent trend. All these data are available for secondary analysis from the Economic and Social Data Service. Any volunteers for the job? Or perhaps it has already been done?

None of the above is to infer that religious affiliation should be interpreted solely as a measure of religiosity. Clearly, for many it is inextricably bound up with national, ethnic and cultural identity.

Posted in Measuring religion, Religion in the Press | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Online Tools for Analysing Religious Data: (2) Britsocat.com

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

Following on from the previous post, a second online resource exists at Britsocat.com, which provides an online tool for analysis of data from the British Social Attitudes survey. You need to register your e-mail address and login with a password, but access is free and it’s very easy-to-use. It’s run by the Centre for Comparative European Survey Data, which also runs a resource for the British Election Study.

This is an amazing resource: over 20,000 questions have been put to respondents over the course of the 1983-2008 surveys, most as a one-off, but some recurrently. Answers are for nationally-representative samples of the population. You can search the database of questions, or browse by category: attitude and value scales; business ethics; central government and the establishment; civil liberties; constitutional issues; crime; defence and diplomacy; the economy; education; e-society; ethnicity and race; Europe; “gender”; health; housing; identity, locality and region; labour market, employment and training; relationships; media and technology; morality and personal ethics; Northern Ireland; pensions and elder care; politics and political parties; religion and beliefs; science; class, age and “gender”; social welfare, inequality and poverty; and transport.

With regard to religion, the frequency of church attendance and religious affiliation has been asked in all survey years (namely since 1983, although not 1987 or 1992, when the survey was not run). Religious beliefs were examined in selected years since 1991. The respondent’s past own and parental attendance was asked in 1991, 1998, and 2008.

In 2008, there was round about 100 additional questions on specific aspects of religion and religious identity (described further here).

Within Britsocat, the questions are categorised for browsing purposes as relating to:

  • the meaning of life;
  • religions and religious organisations;
  • religious affiliation;
  • religious beliefs;
  • religious convictions;
  • religious observance;
  • religious participation; and
  • religious prejudice.

You can calculate frequency of responses for different questions for different years online, and export the results as CSV files for editing in Excel. Alternatively, you can also create charts of the results online, and edit the charts to make them more attractive for your work – and of publishable quality (subject to acknowledging the software creators).

You can also create cross-tabulations to break responses to questions down by age, sex, broad faith group and so on.

Here is an example of what is possible. In 1991, 1993, 1995 and 1996, respondents were asked, 

“How would you describe yourself … as very prejudiced against people of other religions, a little prejudiced, or, not prejudiced at all?”

The responses were: very prejudiced; a little prejudiced; not prejudiced at all.

I looked for breakdowns by age (18-34, 35-54 and 55 plus) and used the chart tool to help visualise trends. It’s interesting to note that the young, who are generally more tolerant towards minorities, are apparently a little more intolerant in this case than the older age groups. Whether this is an aversion to religious difference or religiosity (since a high proportion of the young are secular, and have no religious affiliation) is an open question.

I’ve also used the different colour options to show how the charts can be edited: it’s a neat little tool.

I’m a big fan of these tools, because in quantitative sociology there is a slight fetish for the less accessible statistical softwares and methods – which screen out the amateurs! But there is a great deal of value in using existing data and accessible tools to cover unexplored ground, and also to provide exploratory empirical analysis quickly, particularly for survey papers or policy-oriented papers. Many researchers do not have access to SPSS or Stata at work (they can be expensive) and so tools of this sort are extremely valuable.

An additional tool which allows simple multivariate analysis (namely linear regression) and two-way cross-tabulations exists at the ESDS via the Nesstar tool, though this analysis requires either a UK Higher Education Federation login, or registration with the UK Data Archive (follow the links provided by  the ESDS). Reports of frequencies (percentages of respondents replying to each response option) are available without a login.

For the BSA data, go to the ESDS Nesstar catalogue, and then click on ‘Research Datasets’. The BSA data is then ordered by year, with clickable headings beneath each survey year for ‘Metadata’ and ‘Variable Description’. The individual questions are listed under the latter, categorised by subject.

For those with access to statistical software, the British Social Attitudes survey microdata are available for download at the Economic and Social Data Service, again following registration, or via a UK HE Federation login. The datasets and questionnaires aren’t as ‘browsable’ as at Britsocat.com, so it’s worthwhile using Britsocat.com in tandem with the microdata.

Posted in Measuring religion, visualisation | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Online Tools for Analysing Religious Data: (1) The 2001 Census

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

About a month ago I gave a talk at an Open University M.A. workshop on researching religion using online resources (thanks to Stefanie Sinclair for inviting me). I will soon be writing up the material for a formal BRIN commentary paper, but thought it worth providing a summary of what we covered and the resources available here in advance of the finished version.

Many students researching religion are keen to run their own surveys and devise their own questions. For very specific and unresearched areas, this can be innovative and valuable. It’s helpful however to turn to the wealth of data resources which have already been created – often at great expense, and often virgin territory.

Furthermore, large-scale survey organisations are usually keen to maintain a reputation for quality, and so generally pre-test or pilot survey questions to ensure that responses seem valid and not triggered by very specific wording and use of emotional language. Many existing surveys also replicate questions from other surveys, so that responses can be compared between groups or over time. Student researchers running smaller surveys might also want to consider whether replicating questions might be useful for their own work.

Much of the data on brin.ac.uk/figures is drawn from the 2001 Census and the 1983-2008 British Social Attitudes surveys, each of which can tell us a great deal about religion in Britain. For both of these datasets, online tools are available for capturing and analysing data. I’ll begin in this post by describing access to Census data.

The 2001 Census has been described in detail elsewhere (see the sources listed here), but it’s worth revisiting briefly.

England and Wales residents were asked, ‘‘What is your religion?’ with the following options provided: None; Christian; Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim; Sikh; and Any other religion, please write in…..

The question followed questions on ethnicity and it is thought that people may have accordingly considered their religion in cultural or ethnic terms, as well as (or instead of)belief and religious practice.

In Scotland, the question wording was more specific:

What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?

None; Church of Scotland; Roman Catholic; Other Christian (please write in); Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim; Sikh; Another religion (please write in).

In addition, Scottish residents were asked:

What religion, religious denomination or body were you brought up in?

None; Church of Scotland; Roman Catholic; Other Christian (please write in); Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim; Sikh; Another religion (please write in).

Northern Ireland has a longer history of a religious question being included on the Census. The questions were:

Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion? (Yes; No)

If yes, what religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?

Roman Catholic; Presbyterian Church in Ireland; Church of Ireland; Methodist Church in Ireland; Other, please write in

If no, what religion, religious denomination or body were you brought up in?

Roman Catholic; Presbyterian Church in Ireland; Church of Ireland; Methodist Church in Ireland; Other, please write in

Notably, in England and Wales, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Christian category is not subdivided further. Nevertheless, we can still learn a good deal about religiosity in England and Wales – and at more local scales – through resources available online.

To get hold of Census data, there are various options.

For academic researchers with a UK Higher Education Federation login, you can go to CASweb to download aggregate data at any of the following scales: the country, the government office region, the county, the unitary authority, district authority, standard table ward, census area statistics ward, or output area. CASweb is user-friendly in that it’s straightforward to combine area-level variables. It’s also valuable in that it’s possible to download the data with geographical boundary information (as ESRI shapefiles), and to map the results.

Alternatively, Neighbourhood Statistics is available to all users. This website is a resource provided by the Office for National Statistics: there is no need to register, or use a UK Federation login. There are various ways of looking at Census religion data, for example by entering your postcode and selecting ward or local authority area. To get data on all areas, go to:

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/

Click on ‘Topics’ on the left-hand side of the page, and then select ‘2001 Census: Census Area Statistics’. You can then select ‘Religion’, and choose to view online, or download. You can choose a specific region (North West, North East, etc), or ‘2003 Administrative Hierarchy’ for all regions. You can then save the data in Excel, CSV, or pdf file. The numbers belonging to each religious group or none is given for England, Wales, for Government Office Region, County, Local Authority, and Electoral Ward.

Finally, academic researchers can also go to http://census.ac.uk/ to access individual-level data from the 1971-2001 censuses. You need to register, and once logged in, go to ‘Available Data’ and then ‘Microdata’. You will then need to access http://sars.census.ac.uk/ to download files as SPSS, Stata, or tab-delimited files. They can also be explored online, running simple analyses, using the Nesstar online analysis tool.

The following versions of the Census data are available:

  • The individual licensed SAR, a 3 per cent sample of individuals in the UK with 1.84 million records. Each individual record provides information on their age, sex, the region they live in, educational background, employment status, ethnicity, country of birth, and housing situation alongside religious affiliation. The size of the sample means that it’s possible to examine minority groups in much greater detail.
  • The Individual Controlled Access Microdata Sample (I-CAMS) provides a more detailed version of the individual SAR and can be accessed, following approval of a research proposal, in a secure environment at the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
  • There is also a Special Licence Household SAR (2001 H-SAR) released for England and Wales only, with a 1 % file providing details on individuals in the same family and in the same household. Access can be obtained through an ONS Special Licence from the UK Data Archive. Users have to agree to protect the data during their research to maintain confidentiality.
  • The Household Controlled Access Microdata Sample (Household CAMS) provides full detail on all variables in each file, and also includes data for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The file can be accessed in a secure environment at the ONS, again following approval of a research proposal.
  • Finally, the Small Area Microdata file (2001 SAM) is a 5% sample of individuals in the UK, with 2.96 million cases. The local authority is also identified for England and Wales respondents, council area for Scottish respondents, and parliamentary constituencies for Northern Ireland residents. However, because of the greater geographical detail, the individual-level detail is less than in the individual 3% SAR – again to protect anonymity.

More information is available on http://sars.census.ac.uk/2001. The site also provides customised subsets in SPSS or Stata formats, which may be helpful and accessible if you are still learning how to handle such data. I’ve only worked with the aggregate and individual SAR datasets so far and found plenty to be getting on with.

In my next post I’ll describe what is available for the British Social Attitudes survey, but hope this is helpful for now.

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Clive Field on Attitudes to Islam and Muslim Attitudes in Britain

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

Last week, the Institute for Social Change (where BRIN is based) hosted a seminar by Clive Field, who co-directs this resource and blogs here assiduously. The title was “Muslim Opinions and Opinions of Muslims: British Experiences”. Clive provided a historical overview of Islam in Britain, followed by a “survey of surveys”, and culminating in an exploratory analysis of a survey of British Muslims sponsored by Harvard and Manchester.

The growing salience of Islam shows up in the number and subjects covered by surveys. Before the late 1980s, Islam and Muslims did not feature per se in national surveys; where diversity was considered it was qua ethnicity and nationality rather than religion. Imposing a survey ‘quality threshold’, Clive found that 15 surveys on Islam and/or Muslims were carried out over 1988-2000, 7 of them in 1990. However, 154 surveys were conducted between 2001 and 2010.

Clive then surveyed the headline findings emerging from such surveys, arguing that

‘[t]here is extensive negativity towards Muslims but no absolute level of Islamophobia, nor are views necessarily consistent between questions’.

More specifically, 9/11 and 7/7 spurred negative perceptions of Muslims’ integration, loyalty and radicalism. Knowledge of Islam and Muslims has improved somewhat but is still limited, and appears mostly to derive from (negative) media coverage). While direct social contact has grown, over one-half of non-Muslim Britons have no Muslim friends, and negative attitudes correlate with lack of knowledge and social distance. Double standards appear prevalent: Muslims are heavily criticised for failing to integrate, and yet little effort is made to bridge the gulf between the Muslim and majority communities.

Looking at surveys of Muslims, the first was conducted by Harris in 1989. It is expensive to survey minority communities and particularly those which are linguistically diverse. This means that such surveys often make methodological compromises, particularly with regard to sample size, which is typically 500 (which limits further breakdown by age or other category). Nevertheless Clive found 39 surveys of adequate quality conducted between 2001 and 2010.

The headline findings from these indicate that Muslims are much more religious than non-Muslims in Britain, and stricter on most aspects of morality. The overwhelming majority are attached to Britain, but there appears to be some ambivalence regarding a perceived clash between British and Muslim values, and a sense that Islamophobia is growing in British society.

Clive then provided an overview of findings from the Harvard-Manchester survey of Muslims, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and conducted over February-March 2009. It was designed to complement the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey where the number of Muslim respondents was too small for analysis of responses. Ipsos MORI ran the survey, providing a questionnaire in English, Sylheti and Punjabi and sampling output areas that had a population that was at least 10% Muslim.

Interviews were conducted face-to-face with 480 British Muslims aged over 18. 85% were South Asian, and 55% aged 18-34 (namely a young demographic profile). There were significant rates of non-response to sensitive questions (for example, on sexual morality), while complex questions such as the position of Sharia attracted a high rate of ‘don’t knows’.

Regarding the questions themselves, seven in eight reported that religion was extremely or very important in daily life, compared with 15% in the BSA 2008 survey. 82% reported that religion was very important to their sense of identity (BSA 16%) versus 55% for ethnicity (BSA 29%). Two-thirds reported that they were very or moderately spiritual (BSA 34%). 84% endorsed a literalist view of scripture (BSA 10%) and 44% creationism (BSA 14%).

Weekly attendance at services was claimed by 30% of those aged 18-34 and 50% of those aged 35 and over (BSA 10%). Praying at least several times a day was claimed by 45% of those aged 18-34 and 60% of those aged 35 and over (BSA 5%). Two-thirds reported that they read the Qur’an at least weekly, compared with 11% of the BSA sample reporting that they read the Bible or equivalent holy book. 71% reported that they observe Ramadan fully, and 17% mostly.

Headscarves worn (by the respondent if female or close female relative if the respondent was male) by 58% of those aged 18-34, and 77% of those aged 35 and over.

Regarding religion and personal morality, 75% reported that there are absolutely clear guidelines about what is good or evil (BSA 37%). 60% of those aged 18-34, and 78% of those aged 35 and over, reported that pre-marital sex was always wrong (BSA 8%). 58% of those aged 18-34 and 74% of those aged 35 and over regard homosexual acts as always wrong (BSA 30%). 45% of those aged 18-34 and 58% of those of 35 and over oppose legal recognition of same-sex relationships (BSA 26%).

Regarding the position of Muslims on religion in politics and society, 60% agree that religion is a private matter which should be kept out of public debates on socio-political issues (compared with 71% in the BSA). 54% disagree that it is proper for religious leaders to influence voting of individuals (BSA 73%). 45% report that religion is very or somewhat important in making decisions on politics (BSA 19%).

With regard to religious diversity, two-thirds acknowledge basic truths in many religions, compared with 74% of respondents to the 2008 BSA survey. 38% agree, while 32% disagree, that Britain is deeply divided along religious lines (compared with 52% and 16% in the BSA).

With regard to national identity, 58% reported that they “very strongly” belong to Britain and 29% “fairly strongly”. 57% support a greater role for Sharia courts. 22% of those aged 18-34 and 14% of those aged 35 and over reported experiencing Islamophobia during the two years before the survey period. However, 87% reported that they were broadly satisfied with their lives as a whole (BSA 83%). These findings are interesting and deserve further research (although the sample size will prohibit very detailed breakdowns). Clive also called for further, methodologically-enhanced survey research to build the evidence base, and provided some thoughts on prospects for integration and accommodation.

When discussion was opened to the floor, seminar participants were keen to probe how far negative attitudes among non-Muslims to Muslims were driven by generalised prejudice rather than something specific to Islam; how far they reflected antipathy to the tenets of Islam but not Muslims themselves; and how far they reflected antipathy to the highly religious and religiously-distinctive. The reliability of media-commissioned opinion polls seeking to create stories as well as reflect public attitudes was also discussed more deeply. It was a lively discussion, indicating appetite and scope for further research.

Clive has published on Islamophobia elsewhere:

C. Field (2007), ‘Islamophobia in contemporary Britain: the evidence of the opinion polls, 1988-2006’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 18: 447-77.

C. Field (forthcoming), ‘Young British Muslims since 9/11: a composite attitudinal profile’, Religion, State and Society.

C. Field (forthcoming), ‘Revisiting Islamophobia in contemporary Britain: opinion poll findings for 2007-10’, Islamophobia in Western Europe and North America, ed. Marc Helbling, London: Routledge.

Accordingly, he is not planning to develop an academic article from this research but is happy for the slidepack to be available here at BRIN. For the full set of slides presented at the seminar, please visit this link: http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/muslims-attitudes-and-attitudes-towards-muslims/

 
 

 

 

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Equality and Human Rights Commission – New Research

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

We recently highlighted the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s first triennial review, and of its relevance for British religious statistics. See http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=656

We can now report that the EHRC has commissioned two new research papers, which, when published, are also likely to be of interest to BRIN readers. The following details are extracted, with light edits, from the EHRC’s Religion or Belief Network Bulletin, No. 3, November 2010, which is distributed electronically (to subscribe, contact Research@equalityhumanrights.com).

Professor Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University and Director of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme) will undertake research into Religion and Society: Exploring the Equality Dimension. This has two main aspects. First, she will discuss projects within the Religion and Society Programme which are of particular relevance to the EHRC’s work on religion or belief issues, or are of particular interest to the EHRC because they cover other equality strands, or its other mandates of good relations and human rights. Secondly, Linda will use a survey of EHRC Religion or Belief Network members to elicit information about members’ recent or ongoing research relevant to the topic of religion, equality and discrimination.

Professor Paul Weller (University of Derby) is preparing a report on Religious Discrimination in Britain: A Review of Research Evidence, 2000-2010. This has three main aspects. First, he will discuss quantitative and qualitative evidence that religious groups (including Christians) feel they are discriminated against. Second, he will examine any evidence that may suggest that the nature and extent of religious discrimination differs between England, Scotland and Wales (and between Great Britain and other parts of Europe). Third, he will assess whether there is any existing evidence that religious discrimination is increasing or decreasing. Paul would welcome any relevant information at: p.g.weller@derby.ac.uk

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Faith of Generation Y

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Faith of Generation Y is a new book by Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo and Sally Nash, with Christopher Cocksworth (Church House Publishing, 2010, xii + 153pp., ISBN 978 0 7151 4206 6, £14.99). Generation Y was born from about 1982 onwards, in succession to Baby Boomers (born 1946-63) and Generation X (born 1964-81).

Collins-Mayo is a professional sociologist of religion, at Kingston University. But, as the name of its publisher might suggest, the volume is aimed mainly at a practitioner rather than academic audience – church leaders, youth workers, missioners and teachers. It seeks to capture the mindset of today’s young people and to spell out the implications (and opportunities) for contemporary Christian witness.

The book is divided into two not quite equal sections, sociological perspective (pp. 1-89) and theological reflection (pp. 91-136). The former derives from research conducted over the last five years with young people aged 8-23 (but mostly 11-18) in England who participated in 34 Christian (Protestant or non-denominational) youth and community outreach projects. Respondents comprised 297 who completed questionnaires and 107 who were interviewed. They included a balance of frequent and infrequent churchgoers, although the authors were particularly interested in the latter. 

The main empirical findings are set out, through a mixture of quantitative and, more especially, qualitative data, in chapters 3-5. These consider, in turn, young people’s faith and its relationship to Christianity (pp. 32-51); the processes of transmission of faith and the Christian memory (pp. 52-70); and the relevance of Christian faith to day-to-day life (pp. 71-82). Chapter 6 (pp. 83-9) summarizes the key points from the sociological research. There are six tables.

As the authors are the first to concede, their sample cannot necessarily be considered to be statistically representative of Christian youth work or young people as a whole. Therefore, from a BRIN perspective, the figures must be regarded as more indicative than conclusive. However, findings from other studies with a stronger quantitative methodological grounding are quoted throughout, including the work of Leslie Francis.

The headlines of the book will come as no great surprise. Young people have generally disengaged from Christianity and the Church (to which they are ‘benignly indifferent’), and their faith is mostly not of a religious nature, but ‘immanent’. Family, friends and self tend to provide the central axes of meaning, hope and purpose which enable the young to get on with the business of daily living. On the other hand, among the unchurched some evidence of lingering affiliation and belief was found and also for what Grace Davie has called ‘vicarious religion’.

The book is a sort of sequel to Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15- to 25-Year-Olds by Sara Savage, Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Bob Mayo, with Graham Cray (Church House Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978 0 7151 4051 2), which was based on group interviews with 124 young people around England in youth clubs, colleges and universities.

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