Transcript The religious divide within Europa

The religious divide within Europa
Jaak Billiet
CCT of ESS
Data Collection & Analysis/Suvey Methodology
K.U. Leuven
introduction
• Religious involvement not the focus of ESS
• RI = aspect of social identity & diversity
• Mainly to be used as a predictor (explanatory
variable) for other phenomena:
- some value orientations
- citzenship & political orientations
- attitudes towards immigration
- social capital…
- social trust
• Aspect in testing theories about social change…
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outline
1. The measurement of religious involvement
2. Indications of diversity within Europe
3. Religious involvement and social & value
orientations: a descriptive overview in a biplot
4. Opportunities in ESS for testing Models
5. Conclusion…
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Measurement of religious involvement
Questions in core
- belonging to religion or denomination at present (Yes/No)
- past belonging (Yes/No)
- which religion or denomination? (general + cntry specific)
- how religious? (not—very: 0-10 p scale)
- participation in public religious services (every day-never 7p)
- how ofter pray apart from previous? (every day-never 7p)
plus two additional questions…
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Measurement of religious involvement
Additonal questions in module on citizenship
- membership of religious associations(Yes/no)
- importance of religion (very unimportant—
important: 0-10p)
Aim = measures for all religions
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Measurement of religious involvement
Three constructs for 15 countries, N = 29,517
(1) Most simple = Public religious practice (PUB_REL)
a combination of question on actual belonging and
participation in public religious services
problem that needs further analysis:
number of those who do not belong, do participate
(4% regularly and 13.5% on Holy days - happens in all age
categories).
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Table 1. Index of participation in public religious services
(all samples weighted by pweight). Combination of actual
belonging and participation
Index
Weekly
Regular
Only Holy days
Not practicing
Not pract & not belonging
Missing
Total
%
22,68
10.71
16.64
20.49
28.94
0.55
100.00
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Weekly practice vs. not belonging
100
90
80
70
60
56,4
58,2
56,3
53,7
50,1
50
46
40
36,9
30
31,6
30,2
28,8
29
26
20,7
19,7
20
19,7
19,5
20,7
19,6
15,2
12,6
11,6
12,4
11,2
11,2
10
8,8
4,9
3,8
4,7
4,6
1,1
0
IE
PL
PT
GR
IL
ES
SI
% weekly
GB
NL
HU
CH
CZ
FI
NO
SE
Not belonging
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Measurement of religious involvement
(2) Typology used by sociologists of Religion:
RLGBLG
Actual
belonging
RLGBLGE
Past belonging
RLGATND
Religious
activities
Rel_org
REL_INV
Religious commitment
No
No
-
-
Non_rel 2d gen.
-
Non_rel 1st gen
> monthly
-
Marginal member*
> monthly
Yes
Core member
No
Modal member
-
Marginal member
Yes
Yes
-
less
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Table 2. Typology for religious commitment
(all samples weighted by pweight)
Typology
Core member
Modal member
Marginal member
st
Not religious 1 gen
Not religious 2d gen
missing
Total
%
9.19
23.12
35.02
9,65
22.93
0.10
100.00
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First & second generation not belonging to religious denomination
100
90
80
70
62,4
57,8
60
50
39,7
40
35,3
35,7
35,9
29,3
30
20
10
0,21,7
3,1 3
GR
PL
5,77,4
11,6
9,7
6,7
19,4
14,2
11,3
4,6
21,2
20
16,9
14
7,3
6,9
3,8
5,9
8
5,8
0
IE
ES
PT
FI
IL
First gen.
CH
HU
GB
NL
SI
NO
CZ
SE
Second gen.
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Measurement of religious involvement
(3) Latent (metric) variable (scale 0 – 10)
degree of religiosity 10p
0.86
frequency participation 7p
Religious
involvement
0.73
0.80
frequency of praying 10p
0.87
importance of religion 10p
Model complete factorial invariant for all countries
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Table 3. Significant differences between mean values of
‘religious involvement’ (multiple comparison t-test; prob = 0.01 for each pair)
country
GR
PO
IE
PT
FI
IL
CH
SI
ES
NL
HU
GB
NO
SE
CZ
Mean
5.806
5.349
4.862
4.314
3.659
3.647
3.590
3.405
3.388
3.279
3.094
2.950
2.665
2.303
2.093
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Indications of diversity
See previous tables and graphs
• In some cases: not belonging > belonging (NL, CZ, SE)
• In some cases: weekly practice > not belonging
( IE, PL, and Southern Europe)
• In other countries: not belonging much larger than weekly
practice (GB, NL, HU, CH, CZ, NO,…)
• poles in religious involvement: GR & PO <-> CZ & SE
• Differences Catholic countries versus Protestant countries
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Indications of religious diversity
The flavour for further reseach with ESS data
Possible questions :
• Have these differences implications for socialpolitical orientations, or are these irrelevant?
• How to explain the differences by individual and by
country variables?
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Religious diverse and value orientations
A snatch from the possible issues in ESS that may have
links to religious involvement
- social trust (trust in ‘most people)
- trust in politics
- human values (traditionalism, social justice,
achievement… )
- attitude towards immigrants
- political interest, citizenship
- etc…
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Religious diverse and value orientations
Biplot: map of value orietations, attitudes and groups
(country means) = first impression of diversity
Selection: biplot of religious involvement and
- soc_trust (social trust = view on ‘most other people’ as
being faithful, helfpful..)
- pol_trust (trust in politicians & political institutions)
- conformism: (important to follow the rules & behave
properly)
- pleasure (important to do things that give pleasure)
- helpful (important to help people around)
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(Without SZ: no values for female)
Angles between lines reflect relations between orientations…(90° = 0.0)
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Groups (countries) are means on (cannonical) latent axes
Religious diverse and value orientations
• Contrasts in display somewhat blowed up
• Correlations of religious involvement with
conformity = + 0.27 (expected)
helpful = +0.17 (expected ‘own readiness to help)
social trust = -0.12 (unexpected, unless… « how
others are…’, ’hostile world’, defensive attitude
of religious???»
political trust = 0.00 (no relation!)
hedonism (pleasure) = -0.11 (expected)
• Many open questions for reseach
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Opportunities for testing models
• A snatch of competing theories + focus on country
level
Secularisation theory (a.o. Berger & Luckman, 1966; Breault,
1998; Bruce, 1992; Dobbelaere, 1999, 2002; Olson, 1998;
Billiet et al. 2003)
« religious heterogeneity of country  less religious
involvement because pluralism & competition augments
relativism and demolishes the plausibility structures »
Rational choice theory (Stark, 1997; Iannacone, 1997; Finke,
1997)
« religious heterogeneity & pluralism  more religious
involvement since a plurality of religious firms compete for
customers ».
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Opportunities for testing models
• Opportunities to test these (and other) theories
because of amount of relevant variables at individual
level and useful reference to sources at context
(country) level.
• Test of multilevel model (mixed model) with group
level (countries) and two additional context
variables: GDP_CAP (gross domestic
product/capita) and Religious pluralism
(Herfindahl+Scheepers) computed with distributions
of denominations in datasets
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Opportunities for testing models
Findings (without subjective vars in model)
A. Differences between countries
- Large differences in explained variance at individual
level: between 6% (NE) and 26% (PT)
- relevant variables are known
less involvement: Male, younger = in all countries
ever_job, urban, TV watching = in most countries
- countries with little individual explained variance
NE, CH, CZ, SE, SI, NO (all low level)….
but also PO (high level)
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Opportunities for testing models
B Multi-level model (without IL)
- 23% expl var at individual level (without subjective
vars & denominations); 41% at group level
- Gdp_cap no effect in this group of 14 countries
- Religous pluralism = negative effect (religious
heterogeneity of country decreases religious
involvement)
is in line with SEC theory and previous findings
(Chaves & Gorski 1988; Billiet et al. 2003 with other data)
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Opportunities for testing models
- Much is still unexplained at country level = work to do
with context vars…
- strongest effect of age and gender on religious
involvement
- But…many interactions of expl vars with countries
= differences in individual explanations within countries
examples: gender difference in religiosity larger in ES, FI,
HU, PT than in reference group (SZ)
age differences larger in ES, HU and IE
and smaller in SI
WHY?…
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To conclude…
… many questions and challenges…
use the data in order to obtain better
understanding of European societies
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