Influences on students' views on religions and education in England and Estonia

Abstract

Structural modelling offers an overall pattern of relationships; this paper looks at differences in students' attitude structures between England and Estonia. Where different coherent sets of beliefs exist in a national sample, factor analysis, which focuses on sets of responses which differ between groups, should be able to separate them out. England and Estonia differ both in the composition of the factors, indicating differences in the patterns of viewpoints between the students in the two countries, and in the interrelation between the factors and influences. In England, the first factor indicates attitude differences between the religiously committed and the uncommitted, but in Estonia this is only the second factor, despite the importance of religion to the ‘Russians’. In Estonia the first, integrative, factor relates to religious education, which evokes much more divergence of opinion than in the English data. In the structural model, the most striking differences relate to the stronger differences in belief in Estonia, the greater influence of language spoken in England and the effect of RE model only in Estonia. However, the Estonian data indicate that individual influences on commitment reduce the effect of RE model, a group‐level influence.

Keywords:

• student attitudes
• religion and education
• England and Estonia
• REDCo
• structural modelling

Acknowledgements

This paper was originated with, and is dedicated to the memory of, Dr Pille Valk. Dr Ursula McKenna was responsible for the collection of the English data for the REDCo project, which was supported by Framework 6 of the European Commission. The work of Olga Schihalejev was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory, CECT).

Notes

1. Note that here the terms ‘ultimate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘proximate’ are being used in a different sense to their meaning in religious studies or theology.

2. AMOS is the sub‐programme within SPSS for structural modelling.

3. Despite their general appreciation of the subject they would not choose the voluntary RE themselves as they feel it would contribute to their additional marginalisation by fellow students (Schihalejev 2009, 2010).