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SURVEY CONFERENCESURVEY CONFERENCE

16th March 201016th March 2010

EdinburghEdinburgh

‘The use of secondary survey data sources in practice’

Tony GlendinningDepartment of SociologySchool of Social ScienceUniversity of Aberdeen

tony@abdn.ac.uk

Some funded projects using primary data collected by means of the survey method:

• Health and health concerns of rural youth

• Young people and health inequalities

• Young people and low self-worth

• Youth in post-socialist Siberia: new social divides

Many of these projects can be set against the recurrent theme of youth as a problem:

• See, JEFFS, T., and SMITH, M., (1998), The problem of "youth" for youth work, Youth and Policy, 62: 45-66.

Where the wider context has been to inform evidence-based policy on youth:

• See, MUNCIE, J., (2009), Youth & Crime (3rd ed.), Sage: Thousand Oaks CA.

The undercurrent has been to formulate research projects with youth in terms of:

• Social problems

• Vulnerable groups

• Politicised policy contexts

However, today I am going to speak about another contemporary problem,

Religion

I am going to do this in order to illustrate some of the challenges facing the

researcher in using secondary survey data sources as a method

This is a topic which has the potential to be sensitive and emotive

The issue is the changing place of religion in politics and public life

But what is required in advance of identifying and analysing any secondary survey data sources are well-formulated

research questions

Recent research claims:

• The ‘de-privatization’ of religion

• A ‘post-secular’ Europe

• A ‘polarization’ between the religious and the secular as to the public place of religion

Clearly, it is important that we are well-informed about what the public thinks about the place of religion since this

should influence the debate

And that we have well-formulated research questions from the research

literature, not ‘problems’

But do we have the data?

Our goal is to:

• assess change in attitudes to the public place of religion in Europe, first in Britain

• by means of repeat questions

• from large-scale social surveys

• since the late 1990s at least

Possible secondary survey sources:

• European Values Survey (EVS)

• British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey

Other Research Studies

Data Archives and Question Banks

EVS ‘repeat’ questions

• Four cross-sectional sweeps of the EVS since the early 1980s

• But only one question in common, ‘confidence in the churches’

• In 1999 and 2008, there were another two questions, about religious leaders’ influence on government and about the religious beliefs of elected officials

BSA ‘repeat’ questions:

• The 2008 BSA included an extensive module of questions on religion (ISSP)

• There were a total of six question in common with the previous BSA to include religion as a topic area in 1998

• Only two of the six ‘repeat’ questions overlap with the 1999 and 2008 EVS

Table 1: BSA questions in 2008 and 1998Scores 1 5 (A) (B)

Religious leaders should not try to influence how people vote..

0.92

Religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions…

0.90

Religions bring more conflict than peace…

0.77

Strong religious beliefs lead to intolerance…

0.76

Confidence in churches and religious organisations…

0.67

Churches and religious organisations and power …

0.66

Table 2X: Changing attitudes to the place of religion in politics in Britain 1998 & 2008

Religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions…

1998

(N=791)

2008

(N=1930)

Strongly agree 33% 39%

Agree 32% 30%

Neither / Undecided 14% 17%

Disagree 16% 10%

Strongly agree 5% 5%

Table 2Y: Attitudes to the place of religion in politics in Britain 2008

If more of our elected officials were deeply religious, do you think the laws and policy decisions they make would be…

2008

(N=2238)

Probably worse 45%

Neither / Undecided 29%

Probably better 26%

Multivariate analysis:

• The six questions from 1998 and 2008 BSA surveys (Table 1) allow us to construct a scale ( = 0.72) which appears both reliable and valid

• And we may then conduct a multivariate analysis of the changing attitudes of religious groups which controls for gender, age and education…

Coda:

But we have to check on the representativeness of the BSA samples

The BSA ‘repeat’ questions on the public place of religion were included only in

the supplementary self-complete questionnaires which were administered to sub samples of interview participants

Which takes to another of today’s issues, non-response …