Estimating the size and distribution of South Asian religious populations in Britain: is there an alternative to a religion question in the Census?
✍ Scribed by Brown, Mark S.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 277 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1077-3495
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✦ Synopsis
Growing interest in the religious dimensions of cultural and group identity in British society, particularly among the South Asian community, has culminated in the government proposing a religion question for the 2001 Census. The case for inclusion must consider arguments over the need for information on religion per se, as well as whether the census is the most appropriate way to obtain it. This paper addresses that question through a systematic review of alternative methods of quantifying religious populations. After establishing the limited availability of direct information on religion, the paper considers the application of an inferential method for estimating religious populations based on survey data (the 1994 Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities). With the exception of the mono-religious Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations, evidence of substantial spatial variation in the association between ethnicity and religion severely limits application of the method below national level. Using the religiously diverse Indian population of outer London as a case study, the NSEM is interrogated to see whether the incorporation of other `predictors' of religion as weighting variables improves sensitivity of the method to this variation. In a second method, logistic regression is used to develop predictive models of religious af®liation for application to census microdata (the Sample of Anonymised Records). The conclusion from both applications is that very little of the variation in the religious geography of Indians in Outer London can be inferred from measured characteristics in the census. However, this does not necessarily imply support for inclusion of a religion question in the 2001 Census. With most of the demands for information on religion likely to centre on a relatively few inner city areas, it may be more appropriate (and cost-effective) to de®ne and solve the need for data locally.