Methodological Issues In Mapping The Geography Of Religious Affiliation In Scotland

By Author: Jordon
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Questions on religion were introduced to the 2001 UK Census of Population in response to requests from academics and government agencies for up to date information on Britain's growing multi-cultural society. The principal reason for including the religious questions was to supplement information from Shoes Online the Census questions on ethnicity in order to identify ethnic minority sub groups in terms of their religion. The initial proposal for a single category of 'Christian' was expanded to enable identification of the major Christian denominations.

In Scotland, two religious questions were included. The first asked "what religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?" The second asked "what religion, religious denomination or body was you brought up in?" Respondents were asked to indicate their religion by selecting one of 10 categories None; Church of Scotland; Roman Catholic; Other Christian; Buddhist; Hindu; Muslim; Jewish; Sikh; and Another Religion. In contrast with other sections of the Census, respondents were also afforded the option of not answering ...
... the religious questions. In addition there was also the option of writing in a specific response to the 'Other Christian' and 'Another Religion' categories, but these responses were not analysed as part of the standard Census output. The introduction in the 2001 Census of self-categorising questions on religion provided a unique data set of inestimable value for mapping geographies of religion in contemporary Britain. The present research employed this resource to construct a primary data set of variables that measured religious adherence as well as a range of social, economic and demographic characteristics of the population. Specifically, the data set comprised: Measures of the number and percentage of adherents for each of Discount Shoes the major religions and of no religion, a set of social, economic and demographic measures, including indicators of ethnicity, marital status, social class, housing tenure, employment status education, levels of deprivation, and knowledge of the Gaelic language.

These data were compiled for the Glasgow city region at the postcode sector level. As part of the larger research project on the geography of religion in Scotland, a series of univariate and multivariate statistical and cartographic analyses was undertaken at several spatial scales, from the national to local. These revealed several significant spatial variations in the distribution of religious affiliation in Scotland and pointed to the value of more detailed analysis of the geographical distribution of the different religions at the intra-urban scale. In the analysis, reported here, multivariate statistical techniques were employed to facilitate interpretation of revealed patterns of religio-spatial variation using a combination of religious variables and socio-economic measures for the population of the Glasgow urban region.