Gender, age, attendance at a place of worship and young people’s attitudes towards the Bible

Abstract

This article discusses the outcomes of a questionnaire survey which sought to ascertain the attitudes of young people towards the Bible. One thousand and sixty‐six pupils from Years 6, 9 and 12 in nine English schools participated. The young people’s attitudes are discussed in relation to gender, age and attendance at a place of worship. The research team found that being female, in Year 6 and attending a place of worship very often are factors associated with the most positive attitudes towards the Bible, while being male, in Year 9 and never attending a place of worship are associated with the least positive attitudes. The article also discusses the difficulty of explaining individual correlations regarding age and gender.

Notes

1. 169 pupils (15.9%) provided invalid responses to this question and therefore were coded as missing data.

2. Some pupils provided an invalid response or no response to these statements, but this was never more than 1.9% of the sample (i.e., 20 pupils).

3. One pupil did not identify frequency of worship.