A Christian Research Institute
Research
Young People and Religion in Ireland
The St Mary's Centre has collaborated with several professional partners over many years to undertake a study of Ireland's young people and their relationship with religion.
The Young People and Religion in Ireland Project is composed of three distinct studies on several sets of data collected regarding religion and young people in Ireland, with each data set focusing on a different generation of young people. Multiple dimensions of each data set have been analysed including the students' gender, nationality, parental influence, and religious education. This analysis produced insightful conclusions regarding topics such as:
- the social benefit of religious education;
- the effect of certain personal and contextual factors on young people's relationships with religion;
- the trajectory of their relationship with religion over time.
Each of these studies is compiled in the book Religion and education: The voices of young people in Ireland, edited by Dr Gareth Byrne and Prof. Leslie J. Francis.
Study I: The Greer Tradition
The St Mary’s Centre collaborated with the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin to replicate and extend the pioneering research initiated by Dr John E Greer among sixth-form students in Protestant schools in Northern Ireland in 1968.Greer’s work was systematically replicated in 1978, 1988, 1998, and 2010 in Northern Ireland within Catholic and Protestant schools, and further extended to the Republic of Ireland in 2010. Four separate analyses of the data were undertaken, each focusing on a different dimension of the data. The abstracts for each of the publications in this study are available for download.
Study II: The Millennial Generation
The second study is an analysis of data gathered within the Catholic school sector in the Republic of Ireland. The students surveyed were part of the generation of young people born in the decade around the year 2000; a generation that has come to be called the Millennial Generation. Four separate analyses of the data were undertaken, each focusing on different dimesnions of the data. The abstracts for each of the publications in this study are available for download.
Study III: Religious Education and Religious Diversity
The third study engages with data gathered through the Religious Diversity and Young People survey administered by the Irish Centre for Religious Education (ICRE) among 13- to 15-year-old students between 2013 and 2015. Three separate analyses of the data were undertaken, each focusing on different dimensions of the data. The abstracts for each of the publications in this study are available for download.
This study extended the Young People's Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project to include the Republic of Ireland. The Religious Diversity project was a three-year funded project with the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme (2009-2012) that collected and analysed information about young people and their attitudes to religious diversity in each of the four areas of the UK (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) as well as London as a special case. More detailed information as well as the abstracts of the 48 publications that arose from the project in the UK are available on the Young People and Religious Diversity page of this website.
Publication downloadIf you would like to read more about any of these publications, please contact the St Mary's Centre. |