# Hacking Religion: TRS & Data Science in Action - 3 Survey Data: Spotlight Project

# 3 Survey Data: Spotlight Project

In the last chapter we explored some high level data about religion in the UK. This was a census sample, which usually refers to an attempt to get as comprehensive a sample as possible. But this is actually fairly unusual in practice. Depending on how complex a subject is, and how representative we want our data to be, it’s much more common to use selective sampling, that is survey responses at n=100 or n=1000 at a maximum. The advantage of a census sample is that you can explore how a wide range of other factors - particularly demographics - intersect with your question. And this can be really valuable in the study of religion, particularly as you will see as we go along that responses to some questions are more strongly correlated to things like economic status or educational attainment than they are to religious affiliation. It can be hard to tell if this is the case unless you have enough of a sample to break down into a number of different kinds of subsets. But census samples are complex and expensive to gather, so they’re quite rare in practice.

For this chapter, I’m going to walk you through a data set that a colleague (Charles Ogunbode) and I collected in 2021. Another problem with smaller, more selective samples is that researchers can often undersample minoritised ethnic groups. This is particularly the case with climate change research. Until the time we conducted this research, there had not been a single study investigating the specific experiences of people of colour in relation to climate change in the UK. Past researchers had been content to work with large samples, and assumed that if they had done 1000 surveys and 50 of these were completed by people of colour, they could “tick” the box. But 5% is actually well below levels of representation in the UK generally, and even more sharply the case for specific communities. And if we bear in mind that non-white respondents are (of course!) a highly heterogenous group, we’re even more behind in terms of collecting data that can improve our knowledge. Up until recently researchers just haven’t been paying close enough attention to catch the significant neglect of the empirical field that this represents.

While I’ve framed my comments above in terms of climate change research, it is also the case that, especially in diverse societies like the USA, Canada, the UK etc., paying attention to non-majority groups and people and communities of colour automatically draws in a strongly religious sample. This is highlighted in one recent study done in the UK, the “Black British Voices Report” in which the researchers observed that “84% of respondents described themselves as religious and/or spiritual”. My comments above in terms of controlling for other factors remains important here - these same researchers also note that “despire their significant important to the lives of Black Britons, only 7% of survey respondents reported that their religion was more defining of their identity than their race”.

We’ve decided to open up access to our data and I’m highlighting it in this book because it’s a unique opportunitiy to explore a dataset that emphasises diversity from the start, and by extension, provides some really interesting ways to use data science techniques to explore religion in the UK.

How can we measure religion?

Content tbd

# References