Scottish Church Attendance Survey, 1984, 1994 & 2002

Last updated on 21/08/2014 - 11:21

The aim of the survey was to assess the current number and frequency of people attending church of all denomonations in Scotland. In particular, the principal investigators wanted to know how attendance had developed especially with regard to the age of those going to church. Several denomination changes have taken place in Scotland between the 1984, 1994 and the 2002 censuses. The formation of the Scottish parliament has also brought about boundary changes for many councils which were previously used to analyse church attendance.

The 2 datasets cover church attendance and congregation size for both adults and children, age and gender of congregation and type of area church it is in. The survey also asked questions about the Bible version used in the church and whether churches had Bible study meetings.

URL: 
http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue?sn=4395
Spatial Coverage: 
Scotland
Data Creator: 
P.W. Brierley, (Christian Research)
Time Period: 

Cross-sectional (one-time) study: an earlier study is held under SN:2554

Data Publisher:

Documentation: 

Machine-readable codebooks in Adobe PDF format.

Note: 

Summary statistics are also published in Religious Trends No 4, 2003/2004. As in previous volumes, Religious Trends gives statistics for membership of all UK denominations, with the numbers in this edition broken down by the four constituent countries. It also contains details of the Scottish Church Census for each of the Scottish local authorities.

File Descriptions: 

For the 1994 study:

  • Scot_census_94.tab and Data_structure.tab are ASCII tab-delimited files.
  • a4395qub.pdf is the portable document format file.
  • *.txt are readme and citation ASCII text files.

For the 2002 study:

  • scottishcensus2002.por is the SPSS portable file.
  • 4650userguide.pdf is the portable document format file.
  • *.txt are readme and citation ASCII text files.

 

File Storage: 
Format: 

ASCII tab-delimited files.

UKDA Study Number: 
4395
Data Access: 

Edinburgh University users may contact the Data Library for access.