Church in Wales Statistics

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The biannual meeting of the Governing Body of the Church in Wales took place at Lampeter on 22-23 September. One of the items on the agenda was the report on membership and finances for 2008 and 2009, based on the annual parochial returns. This can be found at:

http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/publications/downloads/sharedassets/membershipfinance/0809-en.pdf

This document has been compared with the equivalent report for 2004 and 2005 so as to get some idea of the principal changes in membership indicators during the past quinquennium (while obviously ignoring year-by-year fluctuations). The results are tabulated below:

 

2004

 2009 % change
Over 18 average attendance – Sundays

41,771

36,836

– 11.8
Over 18 average attendance – weekdays

6,030

5,416

– 10.2
Under 18 average attendance

7,746

5,467

– 29.4
Easter communicants

74,779

65,251

– 12.7
Pentecost communicants

41,582

35,605

– 14.4
Christmas communicants

72,521

59,656

– 17.7
Trinity III communicants

37,913

34,589

– 8.8
Electoral roll

72,303

58,106

– 19.6
Baptisms

8,595

8,076

– 6.0
Confirmations

2,099

1,697

– 19.2
Weddings

4,052

3,479

– 14.1
Funerals

11,129

7,705

– 30.8

It will be seen that all indicators are declining, and some at a fairly steep rate. This seems set to continue (for instance, Easter communicants in 2010 were down again, at 63,515).

Only a couple of mitigating factors can be cited in 2009: Christmas communicants were affected by adverse weather conditions, necessitating the cancellation of some services; and there was a five-yearly revision of the electoral roll, which typically clears out ‘dead wood’.

In presenting the report to the Governing Body, Richard Jones and Tracey White worried that ‘The Church seems to be dropping out of the few significant occasions in people’s lives. Are we being pushed to the margins of society?’ At the same time, they wondered whether alternative counting measures needed to be deployed, especially of youth groups, ‘Messy Church’ and school involvement.

It was not just bad news on the membership front. The Church in Wales finances were also under pressure, according to the report for 2008 and 2009. For the first time since the annual return was introduced in 1990, the level of total direct giving actually fell in cash terms. Partly as a result, parish expenditure exceeded income by £1.4 million, the first parochial-level deficit since 1993.

Overall, including the funds managed by Diocesan Boards and the Representative Body, the Church moved from a surplus of £3.8 million in 2008 to a deficit of £0.7 million in 2009 (with an income of £54.4 million and expenditure of £55.1 million). This was hardly unexpected, given the recession. More information about the Church’s finances can be found in the annual report and accounts for 2009, available at:

http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/structure/repbody/ciwannualreport2009english.pdf

A useful academic study of the Church in Wales during the 1990s, based on extensive original research, is Chris Harris and Richard Startup, The Church in Wales: The Sociology of a Traditional Institution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999).

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Thoughts on Trends in Church Attendance

Posted on September 30, 2010 by PeterBrierley

by Peter Brierley.

The recent debate over whether church attendance has reached a plateau, hosted at the Church Mouse blog, The Guardian and here at BRIN, has been of great interest. As a religious statistician and consultant, and editor of the seven editions of Religious Trends, I’m taking the opportunity to offer additional interpretation of the data.

It is not clear that “Catholic mass attendance has flattened out at 920,000”, as the officially published Roman Catholic mass attendance figures from 2000 to 2007 show a drop of over 8%, down from 1,000,820 in 2000 to 915,556 in 2007. However, it has risen to 918,000 in 2008.

The Church of England official figures for adult Average Weekly Attendance (AWA) fall by 2%, from 941,000 in 2002 to 919,000 in 2008, and their children’s figures drop from 229,000 to 225,000, also a drop of 2%. The Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) adult figures fall from 838,000 in 2002 to 812,000 in 2008, a drop of 3%, and from 167,000 to 148,000 for children (a decline of 11% in 6 years). The Usual Sunday Attendance figures – which would be comparable to Roman Catholic and Baptist measurements – go from 768,000 in 2002 to 718,000 in 2008 for adults (a drop of 7%), and from 151,000 to 127,000 in 2008 for children (a drop of 16%).

What appears to be happening is that Sunday attendance is dropping, especially for children and young people, but that midweek attendance is increasing: up from 103,000 in 2002 for adults to 107,000 in 2008, and for young people (up from 62,000 in 2002 to 77,000 in 2008).

By putting midweek and Sunday attendance together, the drop in Sunday attendance is obscured. The “flattening out” therefore is a mix of Sunday decline and midweek increase.

The question is then whether those dropping out of Sunday attendance are simply switching to mid-week, or whether the ‘mid-weekers’ are new attenders. Christian Research ran a survey in 2004 which showed that the mid-weekers were often new people, but a more recent survey in 2009 run by Brierley Consulting showed that more mid-weekers were formerly Sunday attenders. In reality, the growing number of mid-week attenders is likely to be made up of a mixture of switchers and new people. While the new attenders are obviously welcome, their numbers do not as yet compensate for those dropping out.

Looking at the other denominations cited as exhibiting a plateau – the Catholics and Baptists – neither measure mid-week mass or service attendance separately, and so we cannot say what is happening here. The analysis presented thus far relates more to the Church of England, and assumes that Baptist attendance follows Baptist membership trends – which is not necessarily the case.

While of course it is important to note trends in the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church, it is also important to look at what is happening in the other denominations also. The Presbyterians, Methodists and United Reformed Church are all declining very rapidly; the less rapid decline in the Church of England and the Catholic Church does not offset the general pattern. The only denomination, loosely defined, which can truly be said to exhibit growth is Pentecostalism, courtesy the many black churches.

The 1998 English Church Census showed a further drastic drop in numbers attending church, compared with the earlier 1989 census. The 2005 Census showed a continuing decline, but at a reduced rate. The most recent figures for Anglicans and Catholics (important because these are the biggest denominations) show that while decline continues overall, the rate of decline is lessening. It is important to know why and where that is happening. The analysis presented thus far by Christian Research does not allow this to emerge, but it would be interesting to know – if more data is available than was published.

Peter Brierley is former Director of Christian Research. He compiled and edited the seven issues of Religious Trends, from 1997 to 2008, as well as running the English Church Censuses of 1979, 1989, 1998 and 2005, and the Scottish Church Census of 2002, 1994 and 1984. He now directs Brierley Consulting, which publishes the bimonthly bulletin FutureFirst. Contact: peter @ brierleyres . com.

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Counting Catholics

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

Andrew Brown of the Guardian has just written a very interesting article on the problems of calculating the size of the Catholic community. The church defines this as those who have been baptised living within England and Wales (or in Scotland; these are separate church jurisdictions). A sociology colleague has mentioned however that church administrators do refer to “unbaptised Catholics” – theologically heterodox, but perhaps wise to the need to plan for school places and similar.

The main sources are the Catholic Church itself; the Government (specifically the Scottish and Northern Irish censuses, and data on marriages); and opinion polls and social surveys. The Church data for the most part depends on parishes estimating their community size, predominantly from mass attendance through an annual count, together with estimation of the size of the community which does not attend. This might be gauged from counting rites of passage (baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages and funerals), which are also enumerated for parish returns and sent to diocesan offices for compilation and annual report, in diocesan directories and the Catholic Directory for England and Wales.

Tony Spencer, Director of the Pastoral Research Centre, has published an assessment of data quality of various Catholic sources – diocesan directories, the Catholic Directory for England and Wales, and the Vatican-compiled Annuario Pontificio, which is difficult to access. This is discussed in some detail in A. E. C. W. Spencer (ed.), Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community of England & Wales, 1958-2005: Volume I. A common problem is lack of clarity over how missing returns are treated.

Regarding the Catholic Directory, which is the most commonly-cited source, Spencer suggests that one issue is that data are often not supplied by some dioceses before the publication deadline. This means that the newest data are provisional but often not labelled as such, nor revised between editions. Spencer also suggests that operational definitions may vary between dioceses.

We provide here the best set of data at our disposal for England and Wales over the past decades up to 2005. The sources used have been Peter Brierley (ed.) Religious Trends 2 and Religious Trends 7 (1999, 2008); R. Currie et al. Churches and Churchgoers (Oxford, 1977); and Spencer’s Digest (2008). We also include a graph from the merged set of British Social Attitudes surveys, from 1983 to 2008. (Predicted figures for 2010 are available in Religious Trends 7, and reported data on attendance, baptisms and so on are available after 2005 from recent editions of the Catholic Directory; the latter will be added here in due course.)

For now here is a set of charts: click on the images for a high-quality version.

1. Baptisms as a percentage of live births.

The Religious Trends data originates from the Catholic Directory and may include ‘late’ baptisms. If so, it’s not really appropriate to divide this by number of live births per year. Spencer’s Pastoral Research Centre data (the red series) is restricted to infant baptisms (under 12 months) which is more acceptable.

2. Entries to Catholicism by type: infant baptisms, late baptisms, adult conversions.

This illustrates that a growing proportion of baptisms are undertaken when the child is older – partly because of falling neonatal mortality rates, and partly because families may opt for their children to be baptised at once, rather than individually soon after birth.

3. Catholics as percentage of England and Wales population.

This chart combines the Currie et al. (or CGH) estimates published in 1977, the estimates published in Religious Trends, and Spencer’s PRC estimates. The total population data are from the censuses (linearly interpolated until 1981, with ONS mid-year population estimates from 1981).

4. Percentage of five-yearly birth cohort identifying as Catholic, British Social Attitudes surveys 1983-2008.

Here we have combined all the 1983-2008 surveys and looked at the percentage reporting they are Catholic by period of birth (1900-1904, 1905-1909, etc., up to 1985-1989). Note however that the rate for each age group will be affected by differential mortality (and fertility) rates as well as tendency to retain religiosity or lapse.

The spreadsheet including the data used to create these charts will be posted here later today. There are data gaps which need filling in (by consulting Catholic Directories from the 1970s, allowing for the estimates being flawed) but this is as far as we have reached at present.

Update (9.30pm)
The spreadsheet is now available here.

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How Many Muslims?

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published on 16 September a table giving estimates of the Muslim population of each country in Western Europe in 2010. This formed part of a press release about a new Pew report on Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. However, the estimates are actually from another and still forthcoming Pew report on the growth rates among Muslim populations worldwide, and including projections for 2020 and 2030.

Pew’s UK figure for 2010 is 2,869,000, which is equivalent to 4.6% of the population. In absolute terms, the UK has the third largest Muslim community on the continent, after Germany (4,119,000) and France (3,574,000).

In percentage terms, the UK is in ninth position, after Belgium (6.0%), France, Austria and Switzerland (5.7%), The Netherlands (5.5%), Germany (5.0%), Sweden (4.9%) and Greece (4.7%). UK Muslims account for 16.8% of all Muslims in Western Europe.

The 2010 UK statistic represents an increase of 74.2% on the 1,647,000 (2.7% of the population) which Pew quoted as recently as last October, in its report Mapping the Global Muslim Population (pp. 22, 32, 54).

That figure was primarily based on the 2001 census, which was the first reliable measure of UK Muslim numbers, earlier estimates having been ethnically derived. No explanation (nor source) for the revised estimate is given by Pew, but doubtless all will be explained in its forthcoming report.

The 2001 census was thought to have been somewhat of an underestimate of Muslim numbers at that time, despite serious efforts by the Muslim Council of Britain and other community leaders to get Muslims to register their faith on the census schedule.

The most widely-publicized figures for Muslims since the census have been estimates for Great Britain from the Government’s Labour Force Survey (LFS), which rose from 1,870,000 in 2004 to 2,422,000 in 2008.

These first emerged in The Times on 30 January 2009 and were officially published in Hansard on 7 July 2009, in reply to a parliamentary question. They generated numerous media headlines about the Muslim population of Britain rising ten times faster than the rest of society.

No new LFS-based estimates have been released since, although they could presumably be easily generated by Government or academics (LFS data are routinely deposited at ESDS).

Another Government source, the Citizenship Survey, which covers adults aged 16 and over in England and Wales, reveals that the proportion of Muslims in the population doubled between 2001 and 2008-09, from 2% to 4%. Four-fifths of Muslims at the latter date claimed to be practising their faith, compared with 37% of all adults professing a religion and 32% of Christians.

According to Sophie Gilliat-Ray (Muslims in Britain, 2010, p. 117) the significant increase in the Muslim population ‘may be attributed to recent immigration, the growing birth rate, some conversion to Islam, and perhaps also an increased willingness to self-identify as “Muslim” on account of the “war on terror”’. The demography of Islam is explored in some detail in chapters 4 and 5 of Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010).

The 2010 Pew table can be found at:

http://features.pewforum.org/muslim/number-of-muslims-in-western-europe.html

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How Many Catholics?

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

As part of its coverage of the papal visit, the BBC has compiled a webpage entitled ‘How many Catholics are there in Britain?’ This will be found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11297461

It brings together disparate data from several sources, in particular:

  • Clerical vocations since 1982
  • Professing Catholics since 1983 (British Social Attitudes Surveys)
  • Mass attendance since 1990
  • Ethnic composition of Catholic population in 2008 (CAFOD/Ipsos MORI poll)

The Catholic Church has had somewhat of a chequered history in its collection of quantitative data, and, despite its relative strength, it still has no dedicated and professionally-staffed central statistical unit.

There are various shortcomings in the most frequently-cited British Catholic statistics, those appearing in the Catholic Directory for England and Wales and its equivalent in Scotland, and in the two Vatican publications, Annuario Pontificio and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae.

Much less well-known is the work of the unofficial Pastoral Research Centre, notably Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community of England & Wales, 1958-2005, Volume 1, edited by Tony Spencer (2007). This can be obtained from the Pastoral Research Centre, Stone House, Hele, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 1AJ.

For an overview of the development of Catholic statistics, see sections 2.7 and 2.8 and appendix 7 in Clive Field’s Religious Statistics in Great Britain: An Historical Introduction, available at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/commentary/drs/

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Church Attendance in England, 2005

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

The debate over the Christian Research data last week, together with coverage of the papal visit, led me to look at church attendance data from the 2005 English Church Census. The English Church Census got a good deal of coverage when results were announced in 2006, when it was announced that 3,166,200 people, or 6.3% of the population attended church. However, I wanted to look again to see which areas of England had higher rates of church attendance, and specifically which areas looked more Catholic.

I’ve given more detail on the English Church Census here, and the full dataset is available at the UK Data Service. The data are available for counties, but David Voas here at BRIN has created a table whereby attendance and church data has been fit to district/unitary authority borders, so that it’s possible to look at attendance at the local authority level.

While the table does not include additional data on other socio-economic characteristics (for which go to Neighbourhood Statistics), it’s interesting to see which areas of the country have higher church attendance and which much less, as illustrated by the map below (click on the image to enlarge). This can also be compared with the religious affiliation data from the 2001 Census, illustrated by these maps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, the area with the lowest percentage of people going to church is North East Lincolnshire, at 2.6%. This looks extremely low, but given that the national average attendance is 6.3%, is scarcely an outlier.

Secondly, the area with the highest percentage of people going to church appears to be the City of London, at 57%. This raises alarm bells, because the City of London also reported a very high percentage of people with no religious affiliation in the 2001 Census: 24.6%, which was the fifth highest rate among English local authorities. But of course the City of London is not really comparable with other local authorities; it hosts a much smaller number of people (7,185 in 2001), and only one (Anglican) primary school. However, it hosts 40 churches (as counted by the English Church Census), many of them historic, and they undoubtedly draw worshippers from across London. This link provides some further information.

Similarly, the City of London is also the local authority which reports the highest proportion of attenders of New Churches, at an apparent 4.01% of the local population. (New Churches reject denominational labels or principles, with examples being those within the Vineyard or Newfrontiers franchises.) Because of the small overall population his is down to a single church, which drew in 288 attenders on Church Census day.

The histogram helps illustrate just how problematic the City of London figure is – any statistical analysis of this data would surely have to drop the observation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next highest is the Scilly Isles (18.6% attending church on Sunday), a location which might also be considered atypical. The third highest is Kensington and Chelsea at 17.2%. This may partly be due to the nature of the Royal Borough’s population (there is often though to be a relationship between class and church attendance) and also because the Brompton Oratory and Holy Trinity Brompton are likely to draw in attenders from other boroughs. The next is Westminster (15.7%) which hosts Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral; nevertheless the majority of local authorities with relatively high rates of church attendance appear to be in Greater London or the London commuter belt. The remainder of those with over 10% church attendance are Brent, Enfield, Harrow, Ribble Valley, Lewisham, Wirral, Brentwood, West Devon, Wandsworth, Southwark, Sevenoaks, Guildford, South Bucks, Camden, Cambridge and Kingston-upon-Thames.

The ‘bottom ten’ range from 3.6% in South Holland in Lincolnshire, followed by Kirklees, Wychavon (Worcs.), Telford and Wrekin, Doncaster, Fenland, Ashfield (Notts.), Bolsover (Derbyshire), Rotherham (S. Yorks), and North East Lincolnshire, which pulls up the rear at 2.6%. I don’t know enough about these areas to suggest why; some may host high proportions of non-Christians, others populations which are distinct in other ways, or have dispersed rural populations which are ‘underserved’. This awaits further analysis.

So which areas are most Catholic? This map shows Catholic church attendance as a percentage of population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The highest rates of attendance appear to be in the North West, North East and London. The top three local authorities are the City of London (11.6%), Westminster (7.0%), and Kensington and Chelsea (6.5%), which for the reasons outlined above might reasonably have less to do with the local authority’s population and more to do with their places of worship. The next is then Ribble Valley (5.8%), Wirral, Scilly, Sefton (Merseyside), Knowsley (Merseyside), and Liverpool (5.0%). Some of this is surely due to the legacy of Irish immigration. Ribble Valley also hosts Stonyhurst College, a large Catholic boarding school, which may have boosted its total. Of the top 50, all fall within the North West, North East, Greater London and the South East. The bottom 50 appear to be mostly located in Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, and Nottinghamshire – which are more rural counties outside the south east.

Of the areas where there are high rates of Pentecostal church attendances, nineteen of the top twenty are in Greater London, and the twentieth is in Luton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Brent, 7.3% of the population appear to attend Pentecostal churches on Sunday, although it may be that as with the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals in Westminster there are particularly large churches there drawing in attenders from elsewhere. At 5.6% the rate for the City of London again looks unreliable; the next ranked is Southwark at 4.7%. In 39 local authorities there are no Pentecostalist attenders represented at all – and these are predominantly local authorities in the leafy shires. The map illustrates that attendances are mostly in urban centres.

This is clearly a very basic outline of the geography of attendance. To understand what is driving such variation in attendances, we would need to look at the characteristics of the population, as well as of the nature of the churches operating in each area. Nevertheless, the spatial pattern is intriguing and suggests a strong link to immigration history, and rural/urban differences.

There is much to be gleaned from this Census on its own: readers should look at Peter Brierley’s Pulling Out of the Nosedive (2006), and the UK Christian Handbook Religious Trends 6 for further data and analysis. Given the debate last week about whether attendances have been falling or holding up over the decade, Christian Research’s plans to conduct another within the next year or so are of great interest.

Posted in Measuring religion | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Recent Academic Journal Articles

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Clive D. Field

There follow brief reports of three recent articles in academic journals. These are subscription-based, with free access only available to institutional and personal subscribers. A pay-per-view option is also offered via the relevant publisher websites.

Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 89-92: Christopher Rutledge, ‘Looking behind the Anglican Statistic “Usual Sunday Attendance”: a Case Study’

Rutledge conducted two censuses, four years apart, of adult attendances at the main services in a suburban Anglican parish church, the first over four weeks and the second over five. He demonstrates that neither electoral roll membership nor planned financial giving is an accurate predictor of churchgoing.

Two-fifths of those on the electoral roll did not worship during the census periods, while there were numerous regular worshippers not on the roll. Likewise, many of those who supported the church through standing orders or weekly giving envelopes did not attend services during the census. Overall, usual Sunday attendance is shown to greatly underestimate the number of people engaged with the local church.

Journal of Empirical Theology, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 64-81: Lewis Burton, Leslie Francis and Mandy Robbins, ‘Psychological Type Profile of Methodist Circuit Ministers in Britain: Similarities to and Differences from Anglican Clergy’

Psychological type theory is used to profile similarities and differences between 1,004 Methodist ministers in England surveyed by Burton in 2004 and the 863 Church of England clergy profiled in an earlier study reported in Leslie Francis, Charlotte Craig, Michael Whinney, David Tilley and Paul Slater, ‘Psychological Typology of Anglican Clergy in England: Diversity, Strengths and Weaknesses in Ministry’, International Journal of Practical Theology, Vol. 11, 2007, pp. 266-84.

The two groups recorded similar profiles in many respects, especially when viewed against the profile of the UK population. However, male and female Methodist ministers were less likely to prefer intuition, and more likely to prefer sensing, compared to their Anglican colleagues. Also, male Methodist ministers were more likely to prefer feeling and less likely to prefer thinking in comparison with Anglican clergy.

The findings are interpreted to illuminate strengths and weaknesses in Methodist and Anglican ministry and to highlight areas of potential conflict, disagreement or misunderstanding in effecting cooperation between the two denominations.   

British Journal of Religious Education, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 307-20: Mandy Robbins and Leslie Francis, ‘The Teenage Religion and Values Survey in England and Wales: an Overview’

The Teenage Religion and Values Survey is by far the largest study of religious and moral beliefs and behaviours of young people in this country yet to be completed. It was conducted by Leslie Francis and associates throughout the 1990s by means of self-completion questionnaires from 33,982 13- to 15-year-olds in years 9 and 10 of 163 schools in England and Wales.

The survey has already been widely reported in the academic literature (see the entry in the BRIN database at http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1780). The present article opens by reflecting on the methodology of the research as regards design, measurement and sampling. It then reviews some of the insights which it generated, especially in respect of personality, spiritual health, religious affiliation, belonging without believing, and church-leaving. The major published outputs from the survey are listed and discussed, and three lessons learned are spelled out.

The research group is currently devising a new study of similar scope for the first decades of the twenty-first century and is inviting collaborators to work with them.

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Visualising Religious Switching, Sticking and Leaving

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

David Voas last week sent me a link to this fascinating Internet Monk blog chart, illustrating data collected by Pew on religious background, current affiliation and religious switching in the US. (Please do have a look at the original post and responses – they are full of detail.)

Michael Bell Chart of Pew Data

 

 

 

I have developed a similar chart for BRIN. Respondents to the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey were asked,

‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion; which?’ (the ‘ReligSum’ variable)

and additionally,

‘In what religion, if any, were you brought up: What was your family’s religion?’ (the ‘RlFamSum’ variable).

The responses are also available in more detailed categories (e.g. United Reformed Church, Free Presbyterian, Brethren, Buddhist) which will shortly be uploaded at http://www/brin.ac.uk/figures.

However, for graphical purposes, the numbers for many groups are extremely small, which means they are difficult to depict. It’s also difficult to interpret the significance of the proportion joining or leaving accurately when numbers are so small.

Accordingly, categories were combined by the data publishers to form six broad groups: Church of England/Anglican, Roman Catholic, Other Christian (including the free churches and those people simply identifying themselves as non-denominational Christian), Non-Christian (members of other world religions and New Religious Movements), No Religious Affiliation, and those who refused to answer or did not know. It’s perhaps unhelpful that new and growing Christian groups are included in the ‘other Christian’ group together with nonconformist groups in decline – a further version of this chart could separate them out.

The chart ranks the groups in terms of popularity, with the ‘religion of upbringing’ on the left, and ‘current religion’ on the right. Each circle’s area is proportionate to the size of the group.

Both charts are a type of weighted flow chart: the flow arrows between the past religious status and current religious status have a thicker or thinner width in proportion to the number of people moving between each group at each time point. The intent is to illustrate the proportion of respondents who have switched between religious groups at some point between childhood and at the time of the survey, including from having a religious identity to having none, or vice versa.

Religion-WFlow-2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Britain, there is less switching between religious groups and more from having a religious affiliation to having none (which the BRIN chart highlights) and so the sizes of the original and current religious groups are of more interest.

Michael Bell at Internet Monk used Microsoft Paint to devise the chart, whereas we simply used Excel and added text using Photoshop, avoiding the need to calculate pixel numbers. Curved and straight lines are available in the ‘Shapes’ option and widths can be adjusted to the correct centimetre. The circles were similarly adjusted using πr2  to calculate the width and height options.

The main flaw is that the area of the flow arrows is not proportionate to the size of the groups (which is what may be expected intuitively). The absolute width of the arrows was therefore arbitrary, and so I set the total belonging to each religious category in childhood as having a width equal to the diameter of each relevant circle on the left hand side. The obvious problem with this is that the arrows pointing to ‘Current Religion: None’ add up to having a greater width than the diameter, so one arrow was overlaid over another to ease presentation.

The underlying data are also available in this spreadsheet.

Besides the number of respondents reporting their religious identity during their upbringing, and current religious identity, tables are also available illustrating the data in percentage terms: first, setting the total for each group membership during upbringing to 100% (to illustrate religion of destination for those with a particular religious or irreligious upbringing), and secondly, setting the total for each current group membership to 100% (to illustrate religion of origin for each religious group as currently described). For example, in the first table, 52% of those who had an upbringing affiliated to the Church of England retain an Anglican affiliation; in the second table, 92% of those who currently have an affiliation to the Church of England had an upbringing in the Church of England.

Three issues should be borne in mind. First, the meaning of affiliation is not fixed across religious communities or over time, and additionally depends on the respondent. For Roman Catholics, membership depends on baptism, whereas for other denominations it may be more formal and associational; for some, religious identity also has a cultural component. Some may over-report affiliation as children in order to represent themselves as having switched bravely into having a different identity or ‘None’. Some would also argue that while there are fewer adherents compared with a generation or two ago, the religious practice of those who are affiliated is of increasingly higher quality and commitment.

Secondly, it should be remembered that the chart doesn’t adjust for age or migration history. The Church of England or Roman Catholic stickers are likely to be somewhat older than the leavers, and some of the stickers may also have had their religious identities formed in other countries, for which we make no allowance here. Thirdly, this is a snapshot of religious identity: over the life course some respondents will change their ‘current affiliation’ again – some moving between different religious communities, others choosing at a later stage to move from having a religious identity to having none.

Do I think this is a helpful visualisation method? Well, it’s attractive, and hammers home the point that the ‘Religious Nones’ are the dominant group and the religious affiliation they originally had. It’s not wonderful at depicting switching between religious groups because there is so little – the relevant arrows are hairline. The s-curve option in Excel takes some manoeuvring and it’s time-consuming to develop a graphic in this way. A more adept user of Photoshop may have better luck at devising such charts both efficiently and more attractively. A future option might be to look at using software such as Netdraw, where the width of arrows and position of circles can be determined automatically. Further ideas are very much welcome.

Posted in Measuring religion, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Getting Data on Scientology

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

Scientology appears to be in the news at the moment so it seems timely to offer some ideas on how to count Scientology in the UK.

Scientology isn’t recognised as a religion by the Charities Commission at present, although this may or may not change in future depending on how the Charities Commission define religion. On the one hand, the requirement for a religion to have a ‘supreme being’ was attenuated in the Charities Act 2006, but the need to demonstrate a ‘public benefit’ generated by each religion has been tightened. This is important for religious groups since such recognition would allow remission from local property taxation (the ‘business rate’).

Even so, 1,781 people in England and Wales used the ‘write in’ provision of the 2001 Census to state that they were Scientologists.

Little independent data are available on Scientology, although some estimates are available in Religious Trends 7 (2007/08). This estimated that in the UK in 2006 138,000 people had taken a Scientology course, while there were 15 active groups in existence. It was also estimated that there were 460 elite ‘Sea Org’ leaders in the UK, who had dedicated their lives to the movement (pp. 10.3, 10.4).

This leaves a few options for gathering further data. First, it’s possible to use Google Trends to look at how Scientology is trending among internet searches. Here are a couple of graphs to show how the number of UK searches including the word ‘Scientology’ has varied over the last 12 months and 30 days.

Google Trends is a fascinating tool which may help researchers gather data on less mainstream groups, or those which are less formally organised. Google Trends analyses a sample of Google web searches to estimate how many searches have been done for the term you are investigating relative to the total number of searches over time. The results are given as a Search Volume Index graph, and the data can be exported as CSV files (readable by Excel) for further analysis.

Two scaling options are available, ‘relative’ and fixed’. Relative scaling means that the results are scaled to the average search traffic during the time period selected. If you select ‘the previous 30 days’, the data for Scientology would be given relative to the average of all search traffic for Scientology during those 30 days. If there is a spike to 5, the traffic at that point is 5 times the average for the 30-day period.

ScientologyJunJuly2010

Scientology0910

 

 

 

Alternatively, in fixed mode, the data is scaled to the average traffic for that term during a fixed point in time, usually January 2004, which is set to 1.0. The scale basis then doesn’t change with time, which allows us to compare different time points. (This option however is only available as a CSV export rather than online viewing as a graph.)

Google Trends also provides a link to relevant news stories for the peaks, and thence to ‘News Archives’, both articles ranked by importance, and a timeline. This appears to plot the frequency of mentions in the news archives for the term, over time. For Scientology, the peak appears to be the mid-1950s, shortly after the organisation was established in 1964. However, this data is only available as an online graph and I’m not clear at this point how the graph was created – the results page notes that ‘dates associated with search results are estimated and are determined automatically by a computer program’. It would be interesting to have the data exportable as for Google Trends – but for now I’ll include an extract of the printscreen to illustrate how it looks (click to increase the size of the image).

 

ScientologyNewsArchive

 

Much more is possible with the Google Trends search. For example, you can restrict the search to specific regions, or compare trends for different search terms.

A further option is a tool to investigate ‘trending on Twitter’. We increasingly hear in the news that a certain term or hash is trending on Twitter, and it’s possible to actually look at the trends. Trendistic is one useful website. Here is a search using just the term ‘Scientology’, with the following results.

Trendistic

 

 

Scrolling over the graph shows that the number of tweets on the hour (6pm, 7pm, 8pm) are also available, although not displayed graphically. Charts can be embedded into users’ own websites, which is handy, although the data in CSV format (as with Google Trends) would also be welcome. Because the results for ‘Scientology’ look rather thin, I’m also giving an example of results for ‘Jesus’.

These look like gimmicks, but the serious point is that a researcher following news coverage of particular religious group, or investigating hard-to-reach groups, could use these tools alongside more qualitative approaches to flesh out their intuitions on the religion’s significance.

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Religion and Youth

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Just out from Ashgate is Religion and Youth, edited by Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Pink Dandelion (ISBN 9780754667681, paperback, £17.99, but also available in hardback and as an e-book). It comprises 27 substantive chapters, mostly fairly short, many originally presented as papers at the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Study Group conference in 2008.

Like much contemporary writing in the sociology of religion, there are strong theoretical, methodological and qualitative components in this volume, but some space is also found for quantitative empiricism, albeit more so in overseas contexts than in Britain. Nevertheless, three chapters will be of especial interest to BRIN users, two of them written by Professor David Voas, Simon Professor of Population Studies at the University of Manchester and BRIN’s co-director.

Chapter 24 (pp. 201-7) by Voas is an encouragement to employ quantitative methods in the study of youth religion, including the secondary analysis of existing datasets. Statistics are seen as a necessary adjunct and corrective to reliance upon case studies. ‘Surveys of representative samples of individuals (or congregations or anything else) are important because they allow us to generalize … In trying to discover what is happening and (broadly) why, there is no substitute for investigating the population as a whole via sample surveys.’ Some of the issues involved in measuring religion and change and in analysing survey data are then elucidated.

Chapter 3 (pp. 25-32), also by Voas, is devoted to ‘Explaining change over time in religious involvement’. This identifies age as the single most important attribute in determining the strength of religious commitment, easily trumping gender, education, employment, place of residence, denomination and so forth. The relative significance of age, period and cohort effects is briefly assessed, with cohort differences shown to have greatest impact. Various explanations (some values-related, some not) are considered for a weakening in the intergenerational transmission of religion. This leads Voas to conclude that ‘Society is changing religiously not because individuals are changing, but rather because old people are gradually replaced by younger people with different characteristics.’

Chapter 6 (pp. 47-54), by Mandy Robbins and Leslie Francis, provides an overview of ‘The Teenage Religion and Values Survey in England and Wales’. This was conducted during the 1990s, by self-completion questionnaire among 33,982 young people aged 13-15 attending 163 secondary schools. A sample of such size has the advantage of permitting meaningful disaggregations by a wide variety of sub-groups, including individual Christian denominations. The survey has already given rise to a substantial number of books, essays and articles reporting results in detail. However, it is useful in this chapter to have an overview of the findings for religious affiliation, belief and practice, together with bibliographical signposts to in-depth published analyses. The authors are now engaged on a new study of the next generation of young people, with the emphasis switched from conventional religiosity to alternative spiritualities.

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