While it is widely acknowledged that Northern Ireland is a religious society, Protestants still do not attend church as often as do Catholics. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to employ the Ajzen and Fishbein framework to investigate what factors help to explain why Catholics attend church more regularly than do Protestants. To this end, 333 undergraduate students in the faculty of Social and Health Science at the University of Ulster at Coleraine and Jordanstown were surveyed. For both Catholics and Protestants, attitudes were a stronger determinant of intentions to attend church than were their perceptions of normative and control influences. Of more importance, however, was the finding that the predictive power of the model was enhanced for the Protestant group. This would seem to suggest that for Catholics, church-attending behaviour may not be so much one of reasoned action but perhaps rather more one of habit.
Northern Ireland has remained at the forefront of political discussion since the current troubles upsurged in 1969. Regardless of the opinions such controversy has provoked, there would appear to be widespread agreement among observers of the scene that Northern Ireland is steeped in religion. Indeed, Akenson (1973) reported that 'above all else Ulster has been a religious region' (p. 25) and Rose (1976) christened it as 'probably the most Christian Society in the Western World except for the Republic of Ireland ' (p. 11).
Certainly with regard to the proportion of the population who claim a religious affiliation, Northern Ireland has stood out in the past. According to census data of 1961, only 384 of 1.5 million people chose to describe themselves as humanists, freethinkers or atheists (Rose, 1971). Similar conclusions can be drawn from an examination of data concerned with church attendance in the Province. Rose (1971)' for example, reported that in 1968 some 95% of Catholics and 46% of Protestants in Northern Ireland attended church at least once every week. According to Rose, his figures were four times those reported for Protestant countries such as England or