list of all NORFACE projects on religion
The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) has produced modules on religion in 1991 and 1998; the third is scheduled for 2008. The infrastructure is already in place, most of the costs are already being met, and comparable data from previous periods are available. The NORFACE programme offers a unique opportunity to extend and enhance this major resource.
We propose to boost and supplement the ISSP Religion survey in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, and Denmark. There are two challenges that we aim to address. First, a sample size of 1,000 respondents in each country is too small to provide reliable results for subgroups of the population or to measure change over time with confidence. With intend to increase the minimum sample size to 2,000. Secondly, the standard module of 60 items, of which at least 40 will be replicated in 2008, is very good but gaps in coverage are inevitable. While repeating questions from 1991 and 1998 enables researchers to investigate religious change, the scope for introducing new items is correspondingly reduced. By adding 20-24 new questions to the 16-20 that will be replaced in the core ISSP module, we can more than double the number of fresh enquiries.
The survey will provide data in three important areas: the impact of religion on socio-political attitudes and behaviours, religious change, and religious tolerance and extremism. The very limited space in the core module makes it difficult to do justice to these topics, all of which are central to the NORFACE agenda; we aim to do more in the supplementary questionnaire.
The project combines the impact of ordinary research (with papers and presentations on particular substantive topics) with an important contribution to the data resources available to everyone in the field.
Principal Investigator:
Dr. VOAS, David, University of Manchester, Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, School of Social Sciences