Religious Belief and Co‐education in a Sample of Sixth‐Form Boys and Girls

Abstract

A sample of 2,276 boys and girls in the sixth forms of English grammar-schools completed a questionnaire which included items on religious belief and practice. Results indicate that the incidence of belief is lower than in the adult population, though reported frequency of church-going is higher. Grounds are offered for thinking that the several indices of belief and practice may not be functionally equivalent. Boys are less religious than girls, and have a less benevolent conception of God. Girls in co-educational schools are significantly less religious than girls in single-sex schools. Boys in co-educational schools are less religious only if they are studying science. Reasons are given for thinking that the effects of COeducation cannot be explained in the same way for the two sexes.The main purposes of the present study are as follows:I. To provide evidence of the incidence of certain indices of religious belief and practice in a socially-defined segment of the population. This is defined as all boys and girls in the second year of the sixth forms of maintained grammar-schools in England.2. To examine how, for this population, the different indices are related to each other.3. To discover some of the factors related to belief in God, and in particular to examine the relationship between experience of co-education and belief.The data to be discussed form part of the results of a large-scale, questionnaire survey concerned primarily with problems of religious education. Those findings which relate specifically to religious education will be reported elsewhere. METHODThe instrument used was a questionnaire. After a series of reformulations and a pilot study, a form was finally evolved which contained a number of closed, multiple-choice items, and a number of open, essay-type questions. The topics covered, apart from factual questions of age, parental occupation and subject studied, were : religious belief and practice, the Bible, the Church, religious education in schools, and certain moral issues. Only the first of these will be discussed here. On average, the questionnaire took a little over one hour to complete. In addition, a short questionnaire was sent to the parents of pupils, dealing with their own religious beliefs and practices, and their views on religious education. The questionnaires were distributed and completed during the school year 1963-64. SamplingA list of IOO schools, drawn at random from the total number of maintained grammarschools in England, excluding Scotland and Wales, was obtained from the Ministry of Education, and the headmasters and headmistresses invited to co-operate. Sixteen schools declined. Of these, twelve gave fairly full reasons for refusing, all of which were of a practical nature and none of which suggested a relevant, systematic bias. However, the 23

School Influence and Pupil Attitude Towards Religion

“…Previous research has, however, demonstrated that pupil attitudes towards religion are related to a number of other variables. These variables are sex and age (Garrity, 1966;Povall, 1971), intelligence (Hyde, 1959), religious behaviour (Johnson, 1966), parental religious behaviour (Greer, 1971), socio-economic background (Jones, 1962), the geographical location of the school (Alves, 1968), and the co-educational or single sex status of the school (Wright and Cox, 1967). Since these variables may contaminate the influence of the school on pupil attitudes they must be taken into consideration in the research design.…”

Exploring the trajectory of personal, moral and spiritual values of 16- to 18-year-old students taking religious studies at A level in the UK

“…The rich source of quantitative data provided by Cox's study could answer many more focused questions than were containable within his book Sixth Form Religion. Two subsequent papers explored the relationship between coeducation and religious belief (Wright & Cox, 1967a) and between moral judgement and religious belief (Wright & Cox, 1967b).…”

Associations Between Psychosocial Environments in Religious Education Classes and Students' Attitude Toward Christianity

“…Research evidence suggests that students' attitudes toward religion are influenced by gender, age, religious behavior, and parents' religious behavior (Francis and Kay 1984;Greer 1971;Wright and Cox 1967). The vast majority of studies about attitude toward Christianity have been conducted in the United Kingdom with studies investigating the influence of age (Francis 1989a), location (Gibson and Francis 1989;Greer and Francis 1991), school type (Boyle and Francis 1986), Christian tradition (Greer and Francis 1990), and Catholic identity (Curran and Francis 1996).…”