 |
 |
I don't know whether colleagues have had a look at the 'Life in the UK Test: Study Guide' which is used by people taking their citizenship test? Some of it might be thought tendentious and there are glaring omissions but we might at least expect the basics to be accurate. A section on religion gives the 2001 census data as percentages - and footnotes that 10 per cent of Christians are Roman Catholic. I asked the publisher for the source for this latter statistic (plainly not the 2001 census). They said it came from the Home Office and 'correlated with the British Social Attitudes Survey' (sic). Checking the latter for 2001 we find that the Home Office (or whomever) had chosen the wrong denominator, according to the BSA survey 10 per cent of the population are RC, but 20 per cent of Christians. Anyone else spotted similar errors (obviously no one in the Catholic hierarchy has checked this one out)? What trivia occupy us retired folk! Seriously, though, can someone answer this question for me: according to the census 78 per cent of the population is Christian (England and Wales) but 54 per cent of the population according to the BSA. Can one simply apply the RC percentage from the BSA Survey to the census count of Christians? (Let's leave aside the question of whether religion had the same meaning in both census and survey) All figures 2001. Robert Professor Robert Moore School of Sociology and Social Policy University of Liverpool Eleanor Rathbone Building Bedford Street South LIVERPOOL L69 7ZA tel and fax: 44 (0) 1352 714456 ****************************************************** Please note that if you press the 'Reply' button your message will go only to the sender of this message. If you want to reply to the whole list, use your mailer's 'Reply-to-All' button to send your message automatically to [log in to unmask] Disclaimer: The messages sent to this list are the views of the sender and cannot be assumed to be representative of the range of views held by subscribers to the Radical Statistics Group. To find out more about Radical Statistics and its aims and activities and read current and past issues of our newsletter you are invited to visit our web site www.radstats.org.uk. *******************************************************