Religion in the Netherlands – The Rough Data
Contrary to what some people seem to think, the Netherlands does not have a national census every so many years. We do however have a huge archive that incluces almost every possible statistic you can imagine. Both academic and semi-academic/semi-governmental institutions have since long conducted surveys among people in the Netherlands. One of the most important themes is religion.
R. Eising, G. Kraaykamp, P. Scheepers and P. Thijs, have now published a data guide: Religion in Dutch Society – Documentation of a national survey on religious and secular attitudes and behaviour in 2011-2012:
This Data Guide provides the documentation of the research design, the sampling method, and the variables of the national Dutch survey Religion in Dutch Society 2011-2012 as part of general research program on social and cultural developments in the Netherlands. This cross-sectional survey is a replication and extension of six previous surveys that can be used to ascertain and analyse social trends in Dutch society from 1979-2012.
In 1979 a nation-wide survey called Secularisation and depillarisation in the Netherlands (Secularisering en ontzuiling in Nederland (SON)) was conducted. The aim of this survey was to investigate the influence of church involvement and religious beliefs on nonreligious attitudes and behaviours in contemporary
Dutch society.Its documentation Religion in Dutch Society by Felling etal. (1986) and the corresponding data (in SPSS format) were made available to other researchers and were stored at Data Archiving and Networked Services – DANS.
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This additional data collection for 2011-2012 improves possibilities to test hypotheses on processes of secularization and individualization, spanning a period of 30 years.
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Most of the research questions that are studied in contemporary sociology can be related to three general themes: social inequality, social cohesion, and modernization. SOCON has particularly focused on the last two themes. Social cohesion includes the degree to which the members of a society are connected. At the micro-level, this can be assessed by measuring how individuals are integrated in social networks. Integration can occur at different levels: the micro-level (within families), the meso-level (within voluntary organizations, schools, work places), and the macro-level (i.e., connections with society at large). Modernization refers to developments in attitudes, life styles and careers. Due to several structural developments, Dutch society has changed its norms, life styles and life careers.By looking at differentiation in modernization, issues of social cohesion are linked to macro-level change. More in particular, we have focused on the process of secularization and its consequences, in terms of declines in social cohesion, for political and moral attitudes and behaviours.
pp. 9-11
Although Muslims are included in the survey there isn’t much specified data on Muslims but there is a data on Islamophobia and perceptions about Muslims / Islam; a little more then I have seen so far.
We should be happy with these researchers putting their data guide online without any paywall. It does not only provide us with longitudanal statistics on religion but it also gives us an idea of how this type of research is actually done in the Netherlands.
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See also the website of DANS
Note that the data are made available by DANS. Neither the original collectors nor DANS bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation by others.