English Church Census, 2005 – Dataset Released

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

On 30 March the Economic and Social Data Service released for secondary analysis the dataset from the 2005 English church census, conducted on 8 May of that year under the auspices of Dr Peter Brierley of Christian Research and sponsored by a consortium of funders, including the Economic and Social Research Council.

The census was undertaken by means of self-completion postal questionnaires, responses being obtained from 18,633 of the 37,051 Christian places of worship which were contacted. A fuller description of the methodology is available online, together with details of how to access the dataset (catalogued as SN 6409), at:

http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=6409

Summary data were published by Christian Research in printed form in 2006, in Pulling out of the Nosedive and in UK Christian Handbook, Religious Trends, No. 6, 2006/2007, both by Peter Brierley. These books contain comparisons with the results of the earlier English church censuses of 1979, 1989 and 1998.

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Tolerance of Religion

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

ComRes has just released on its website the results of an opinion poll it conducted for the BBC on 26-28 February 2010, which does not yet appear to have been publicized by the BBC itself. A representative sample of 1,005 adult Britons aged 18 and over was interviewed by telephone.

Only one question was put to the sample: ‘In your opinion, is Britain becoming more tolerant or less tolerant of religion?’ 39% of respondents replied that Britain is becoming more tolerant, 14% reported no change and 44% detected a growing intolerance towards religion.

Of standard demographics, only the breaks by age particularly stand out: 64% of those aged 18-24 considered that Britain is becoming more tolerant of religion, whereas 57% of those aged 65 and over felt it is becoming less tolerant (more than twice the proportion of this cohort believing it to be more tolerant).

Because of the limited sample size, disaggregations by religious profession are only meaningful for the categories of Christians and those with no religion. By a margin of 8% (37% more and 45% less tolerant), Christians were more inclined to pessimism, while for the irreligious there was a net 3% towards optimism (44% against 41%).

For the full statistics, see: http://www.comres.co.uk/page165372537.aspx

The results are broadly consistent with those of other recent surveys covering religious prejudice and discrimination in pointing to an environment in which religious people in Britain have a sense of being increasingly under scrutiny. This is especially so for Muslims (on account of rising Islamophobia) and Christians (who feel vulnerable in the face of legislative changes, unsuccessful court cases and attacks from high-profile secularists).

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Who should run State Schools?

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Who should run state schools? A new survey commissioned by two trade unions, NASUWT: The Teachers’ Union and Unison, has posed just that question. It was conducted by Ipsos MORI who interviewed a representative sample of 1,211 adults aged 15 and over in England face-to-face in their homes on 5-11 March 2010.

The sample was asked to consider the idea that ‘more schools in the future could be run directly by private companies, religious groups, charities or groups of parents rather than being run by the local council as they generally are now’.

When quizzed which would be the most appropriate group to run state-funded schools, 62% replied that it should be local authorities and 14% universities or colleges. Only 4% suggested religious organizations, with the highest percentage among demographic sub-groups being 15% for parents whose children attended a private school. The next highest figure in favour of religious organizations was the 7% recorded for those aged 65 and over, Londoners and readers of broadsheet newspapers.

When the question was inverted, and respondents were asked which group should not run state-funded schools, religious organizations headed the list at 35%, closely followed by private companies (34%) and groups of parents (32%). The opposition to religious organizations was never an actual majority for any particular sub-group, but it did exceed  40% for single people, those aged 15-24, middle income earners, those who considered the standard of state education to be relatively poor, and residents of East Midland, Eastern, North-Eastern and South-Western counties.

It should be noted that the answers in respect of religious groups should not be confused with attitudes to what are popularly known as faith schools, which remain maintained schools generally drawing their recurrent funding from the local authority. The principal conclusion of the poll is that most people want state schools to remain under direct state control, rather than their management to be ‘privatized’ in some way. However, it is significant that, of the various ‘privatization’ options, management by religious organizations is one of the least attractive with the public.  

Detailed computer tabulations of results from this poll will be found at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2579

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Christian Schools and Social Selectivity

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

A new report from the Sutton Trust suggests that Christian state secondary schools in England are more socially selective than their secular counterparts.

Entitled Worlds Apart: Social Variation among Schools, it has been prepared by Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson of the Centre for Education and Employment Research, University of Buckingham.

It will be found at: http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/Worlds_apart.pdf

The researchers have used a new indicator developed by the Department of Communities and Local Government. This is the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI), which plots the proportion of children in defined areas who are in families in receipt of income support.

These IDACI data have enabled them to calculate a Social Selectivity Index for each maintained secondary school. A high score indicates that a school takes fewer pupils from income deprived homes than would be expected from the locality, a low score that it takes an above average number.

For the large category of 2,679 comprehensive schools, the mean social selectivity score was 497.0. However, for 140 Church of England schools it was 520.1, for 308 Roman Catholic schools 507.2 and for 22 other Christian schools 515.9. The 14 non-Christian schools scored 482.3 and 2,195 non-faith schools 494.1.

The results of this survey could well restoke the fires of debate about faith schools in this country, especially as regards their perceived social divisiveness.

The Sutton Trust was founded in 1997 by Sir Peter Lampl with the aim of promoting social mobility through education. It is particularly concerned with breaking the link between educational opportunities and family background.

Those seeking to learn more about faith schools more generally might like to read Elizabeth Green, Mapping the Field: A Review of the Current Research Evidence on the Impact of Schools with a Christian Ethos (London: Theos, 2009, ISBN 978 0 9562182 0 9, £10).

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The Nationality of Numbers

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ingrid Storm

by Ingrid Storm.

As interesting as studying religion in Britain is, we often want to know to what extent what we find here is similar or different to the results from other countries. However, a problem with cross-national comparative studies of religion (and other social opinions, attitudes and behaviours) is that national context can make a huge difference to the meaning of certain concepts.

In my research, I compare religiosity in Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, and find large differences that are only partly due to differences in what we would call “levels of religiosity” and just as much to do with differences in historical and political contexts. For example, more than eighty percent of the Danish population are members of the Church of Denmark, even though only a tiny proportion attend church regularly. Like in other Scandinavian countries, a large proportion of Danes seem to be members because they never bothered to opt out rather than as a result of a conscious decision.

DenmarkBritainRel

This is not to say that church affiliation is a meaningless variable. Perhaps this is not “religion” in the pure sense of the word, but as researchers we are often interested in how different expressions of religiosity have different connotations. Qualitative research has revealed that even as church membership is extremely common in Denmark despite otherwise widespread secularism, it is still important to many people in Denmark  as a way of expressing their identity or cultural heritage, supporting the maintenance of church buildings and last but not least because they want church services at important rites of passage such as weddings and funerals.

Nevertheless, the problem remains: how can such statistics be meaningfully compared to those of for example Britiain, where church membership is an expression of personal religiosity to a much larger extent? There is no easy answer to this. In studies involving a large number of countries one can control for national context through multilevel analysis. The problem here is that even when one does observe national differences it can be difficult to understand what these differences signify.

In smaller comparative studies such as my own, involving only a small number of countries, there is no statistical method available. Rather, the only option is to supply the quantitative analysis with rich historical and contextual analysis of each case country:  the relationship between state and church, the levels of religiosity, the changes in recent years and so on.

Knowledge of the national context informs us not only of why one can observe differences but also what variables it is most meaningful to compare in the first place. Sometimes context dependency makes like for like comparisons inadvisable. In the above example it would make more sense to compare Danish church membership with British self-stated “belonging to a religion” rather than British church-membership.   In other words, even for larger comparative studies, contextual knowledge is an important supplement to statistical analysis.

Ingrid Storm is a PhD student at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester


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Christian Smith on research into religion: repositioning scholarly journal articles

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

This post is not directly about ‘British religion in numbers’ but I thought Christian Smith’s thought-piece on what should get published was worthy of signposting.

The paper is entitled ‘Five Proposals for Reforming (Especially Quantitative) Journal Article Publishing Practices in the Sociology of Religion toward Improving the Quality, Value, and Cumulativeness of Our Scholarship’.

Christian Smith is Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame and a major figure in the study of sociology of religion. In brief, the proposals are:

1. Scholarly journals should routinely solicit and publish numerous descriptive empirical research notes in every published issue.
At present journals are dominated by ‘the article’ grounded in theory, which excludes shorter pieces reporting applied research. Smith writes that ‘[the] expectation that every publishable piece of scholarship be “theoretically significant” is unnecessary and counter-productive’ (p. 7).

2. Scholarly journals should encourage and more frequently publish synthetic meta-analyses and literature reviews of accumulated published research notes and articles.
This type of work would allow compilation of and reportage on ‘the state of the art’, helping young researchers get up to speed, and established researchers to identify gaps. Such articles are generally found in Annual Review-type series, but Smith suggests that there is no reason the existing journals should monopolise this form.

3. Journal editors, paper reviewers, and readers should require of submitted and published research notes and articles a greater amount of specific information about their particular data and methodologies.
The specific example he gives is of people not always providing the sample size or the response rate, of the survey dataset which they are analysing. Researchers also need to address possible systematic non-response biases more explicitly, and use of weights. Smith also considers that the reporting of methodology for qualitative and experimental studies needs to be firmed up: ‘[p]aper authors sometimes claim, for example, to have conducted “ethnographies,” when really they have mere done some limited participant observation. And sometimes authors assert that they have conducted a “participant observation” study, when in fact they have only conducted some interviews, studied some printed literature, and taken a few notes on a field setting’ (p. 17).

4. Scholarly journal publications should be both more careful and more bold and confident about claims concerning causation and causal inferences and explanations in social life.
Many datasets only allow us to identify correlation, rather than causation, but analytical sociology is concerned with explaining social phenomena, specifically the mechanisms by which different outcomes come about. As David Hume noted, we can never observe causes directly, but we can aspire to coherent causal understanding and explanation.

5. Scholarly journal publications should pay less attention to statistical significance and more attention to the actual causal force, power, or effects that variables appear to exert on outcomes.
This section of the paper refers to the corpus of literature produced by Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, regarding the conflating of statistical significance with substantive significance. Smith concludes, ‘if a variable, particularly in a large dataset, is statistically significant but makes little difference, then it simply should not matter… [and if it] is demonstrably important in the meaningful difference it appears to make in the outcome yet remains shy of statistically significance at the (totally arbitrary) p <.05 level, then it should still count’ (p. 23).

The full paper, which is part of the ARDA Guiding Papers Series, is worth a full and considered read. The Guiding Papers Series can be found here, and the paper itself here.

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Taking Part in England

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew
Religious Identification from the 2007/08 Taking Part survey

Hello again: I am back in Manchester after some time away for a round of conferences. This post is just to flag up an interesting survey not yet in the database, and related tools.

The Taking Part in England survey is a large survey of cultural and leisure participation in England, sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The first was fielded in July 2005 and it has been run annually since then. The current collection agency is BMRB Social Research, which operates the survey via face-to-face interview.

Traditionally, the DCMS (or its predecessor departments) had flimsy evidence on audiences and the population at large, on which to base their bids for government funding. Data on the financial needs of arts organisations were more plentiful, but it was not always clear whether organisations which clearly needed money were having much ‘impact’. This led to the commissioning of a large continuous survey – namely Taking Part.

Surveys are expensive and the challenge for DCMS is the need to cover a wide variety of cultural practices, many of which are of minority appeal, but highly valued by those who engage in them. Acccordingly, the Taking Part surveys employ very large sample sizes: about 28,000 adults aged 16 and over. The surveys cover a wide variety of cultural and leisure forms in depth, and both personal participation (for example, whether the respondent is a singer, plays a musical instrument, practises a craft, or many other arts and crafts) and attendance as a spectator or audience-member (at dance performances, concerts, exhibitions, and many other events).

A large variety of socio-demographic information is also included, and of particular interest to researchers in religion is that a question on religious adherence has been asked each year (the question code is RELIGION):

What is your religion?

Respondents were offered the following options:

No religion; Christian (including Church of England, Catholic, Protestant, and all other Christian denominations); Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim; Sikh; Other (specify).  

The dataset also identifies whether the respondent spontaneously identified themselves as Atheist/Agnostic, whether they refused, or whether they said that they didn’t know.

In 2007/08, a question was added on religious practice (RELPRAC):

Are you currently practising this religion?

A more expansive question relates to how participants use their free time (FreTim):

I would now like to ask you about the things you do in any free time you have. Please look at this list and tell me the number next to each of the things you do in your free time.

In 2007/08 this question offered 35 different options, of which number 34 is ‘religious activities, going to place of worship, prayer’. (Note however that this was not offered as an option in the earlier surveys.)

Another potentially useful question is TVPROG: Thinking about when you watch television, what type of programmes do you watch nowadays? This includes religious programmes as a response option.

The focus of the survey is secular recreation or leisure, and religious participation is not the main focus. However, the questions regarding lack of engagement with the arts or other leisure practices include ‘against my religion/beliefs’ as a response, which may give researchers into religion useful information. In addition, the focus of the survey is on activity with secular artistic content, so that the survey seeks to capture participation in religious festivals where ‘these may be primarily religious events, but include considerable artistic content’ (Technical Report to 2007/08 survey, p. 273).

Of particular note is that the large sample size allows researchers to look at religious identification at a fairly fine geographical area, down to about middle super-output area level (roughly equivalent to an area containing, on average, 7200 people). Ideally, the question on practice would have been included every year, but perhaps it will be included again in future.

Outside the Census and the Labour Force Survey, this may be one of the largest recurrent general social surveys which includes a religion question.

Furthermore, DCMS also provide users with the ability to look at frequencies and cross-tabulations for 2007/08 data using NETQuest, a handy online analysis tool, without having to download the dataset from the UK Data Archive and using statistical software.

This tool allows users to see with ease how identification and current practise vary with age, sex, income, geographic region, and ethnicity. Users have to register and access it by logging in, but the tool is very intuitive and visually appealing, comparing well with Nesstar.

I’m including a bar chart of religious identification here, using the NETQuest tool to look at 2007/08 data. It’s interesting to note that practically exactly two-thirds report that they are Christian (66.6%) and 24.8% report that they are of no religion. Of those who indicated that they did have a religion, 39.5% reported that they did currently practise their religion, and 60.4% reported that they did not. The remaining 0.1% refused.

For those wanting the full microdata, the following surveys are available at the UK Data Archive:

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2005-2006, SN 5717

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2006-2007, SN 6272

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2007-2008, SN 6273

Additionally, here is a selection of useful links:

DCMS pages on the Taking Part survey:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/research_and_statistics/4828.aspx

Taking Part via NetQuest: http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/research_and_statistics/6762.aspx

Arts Council England research and analysis using Taking Part data:

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/research/arts-audiences/taking-part-survey/

Good luck with your research in this area, and let us know what you find!

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Bible Reading and Bible Origins

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Spring 2010 issue of Word in Action, the Bible Society’s magazine, contains an article by Jennie Pollock entitled ‘Positive Vibes for Bible’. This sets out the headline findings of a recent opinion poll commissioned by Theos, the public theology think tank which is part-supported by the Bible Society. You will find this article at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/Products/product_1079/wia_spring2010.pdf

In fact, the research was conducted by ComRes as far back as 14 October-21 November 2008 among a telephone sample of 2,060 adults aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom. Two background questions about the Bible were included as part of the quantitative phase of the Theos ‘Rescuing Darwin’ project.

These particular questions were not reported on in the main document arising from the survey: Caroline Lawes, Faith and Darwin: Harmony, Conflict or Confusion? (London: Theos, 2009, £10). However, the full data tabulations for them were posted by Theos on its website on 18 February 2010 and will be found at: 

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/Rescuing_Darwin_data_set.aspx?ArticleID=3838&PageID=110&RefPageID=110

The first question asked how often respondents read the Bible. 12% replied at least once a week, 27% less often and 61% never. Weekly or more frequent readers were likely to be aged 65 and over (19%), to live in Northern Ireland (20%), and to be ethnic blacks (29%) or practising Christians (88%). Non-readers were especially prevalent among those aged 18-24 (73%), those whose final level of education was GCSE or equivalent (70%), Asians (78%), non-Christians (71%) and those with no religion (82%).

The second question offered four statements about the Bible and asked which came closest to the interviewee’s opinion. 26% considered the Bible to be the divinely inspired word of God, including 39% of those aged 65 and over, 35% in Wales, 33% in Northern Ireland, 35% of the DE social group, 36% with no educational qualifications, 64% of blacks and 83% of practising Christians.

For 37% the Bible was a useful book of guidance and advice for our lives but not the word of God. 19% regarded it as beautiful literature but otherwise irrelevant to us today. 11% dismissed it as an irrelevant and dangerous collection of ancient myths, including 19% of those aged 18-24, 24% of Asians, 22% of non-Christians and 19% with no religion.

Other surveys have also covered the degree to which the Bible is considered to be of divine origin, although the question-wording is not strictly comparable with that used in this ComRes/Theos poll. For the results from these earlier studies, see:

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

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Quadrant and FutureFirst

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Two extremely useful bi-monthly newsletters for anybody interested in religious and social statistics are Quadrant (ISSN 1351-9220) and FutureFirst (ISSN 2040-0268). They are published by Christian Research and Brierley Consultancy respectively and distributed to members of each organization as part of their subscription package. Personal annual subscriptions to Christian Research currently cost £30 and to Brierley Consultancy £18. Every issue of both these newsletters runs to six pages and comprises a mixture of substantive articles and snippets of information, including quite a bit of international data.

The latest issue (No. 8, April 2010) of FutureFirst contains two such global articles, on ‘Muslims and evangelicals’ and on ‘American religion’. Of the Britain-related content, perhaps most interesting is the relatively short piece and accompanying map estimating county church attendance in England in 2010, projected from the 2005 English church census which was conducted by Christian Research. Overall current Sunday churchgoing in England is calculated at 5.7% of the population, but 31 of the 47 counties are below this figure. The lowest percentage is recorded by South Yorkshire and the highest by Greater London, closely followed by Merseyside. Factoring in mid-week attendance brings the national total for 2010 up to an estimated 6.3%.

Distributed with this particular issue of FutureFirst is a six-page supplement on Roman Catholic Church statistics in England and Wales, prepared by Peter Brierley and available for £1.00 from him at The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. The data in it are substantially abstracted from Tony Spencer’s invaluable Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community in England & Wales, 1958-2005, Volume 1, which can still be purchased from the Pastoral Research Centre, Stone House, Hele, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 1AJ. Brierley reproduces statistics for the years 1997-2005, adds some later figures from the Catholic Directory and produces estimates for 2010. The topics covered comprise Catholic population, numbers joining the Church, marriages, deaths and mass attendance. There is a general pattern of steady decline. Discrepancies between the Church’s counts of mass-goers and the four English church censuses since 1979 are noted.

The most recent issue of Quadrant is No. 19 (March 2010). This includes features on: the latest church attendance statistics from the Baptist Union and the Church of England; the British Social Attitudes Survey, 2008; the diversity audit of the Church of England; the Citizenship Survey, 2008-09; and the online poll of attendees at Spring Harvest. You can also read more about all these topics in news posts on the British Religion in Numbers website.

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Do Aliens Walk the Earth?

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Who believes that aliens live among us? Quite a lot of us, apparently, according to a Thomson Reuters News Service poll released on 8 April.

It was conducted by Ipsos, between 4 November 2009 and 13 January 2010, in 22 countries representing three-quarters of the world’s GDP. Interviewing was via the Ipsos online panel of adults aged 18-64, with 1,000+ respondents per country (and 24,077 in aggregate).

Although the poll findings have been picked up on a huge scale by print and broadcast media around the world (as will be evident from a simple Google search), most reports (including those which have appeared in the British print media) are based on a truncated press release, which does not feature the British data.

However, topline results for all 22 countries will be found at:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/One-in-Five-20-Global-Citizens-Believe-That-Alien-Beings-Have-Com-1144745.htm

and

http://www.emediaworld.com/press_release/release_detail.php?id=878510

Overall, in these 22 countries, 20% of adults are convinced that ‘alien beings have come to earth and walk amongst us in our communities disguised as us’. In Britain the figure is 16%, placing us thirteenth in this particular league table of belief.

The top slots are filled by India (45%), China (42%), Japan (29%) and South Korea (27%), the only four Asian countries to be surveyed. Italy (25%) records the highest figure in Europe, with France, Sweden, Belgium and The Netherlands at the foot of the table (on 8 or 9%).

In general, those who believe that aliens walk the earth are most likely to be found amongst men, the under-35s and the higher educated. However, no demographic breaks are as yet available for Britain alone (at least in the public domain).

The 16% of Britons believing that aliens live among us is slightly higher than the 13% found in a YouGov poll for The Sun in July 2008 (when 37% also agreed with the statement that an alien being has visited earth).  

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