Conducting a wide-ranging survey of Catholic adults living in Britain aimed to provide a detailed study of personal faith, social attitudes, and political engagement within a significant religious minority in Britain with distinctive historical roots and in which 'tribal' feelings of belonging have been strong. The core topics would consist of personal faith, religiosity, and associational involvement in parish life; attitudes towards leadership and governance within the institutional church; attitudes on social and moral issues; and political attitudes and engagement. It would be thematically and analytically rich, providing a comprehensive portrait of contemporary social, religious, and attitudinal heterogeneity amongst Catholics.

By undertaking this large-scale survey, an important and distinctive contribution would be made to the sociology of religion in Britain in general and to the study of its Catholic population in particular. The survey was conducted online by Savanta ComRes, from October to November 2019. This is a cross-sectional dataset, based on interviews with 1,823 self-identifying Catholics adults in Britain (aged 18 and over).

These datasets provide datasets on the religion people connect or identify with (their religious affiliation), whether or not they practise or have belief in it, by age and sex using Census 2021 data.

Religious groups in the detailed religion classification

The counts for religious groups identified in the Religion (detailed) in England and Wales dataset are a representation of those who chose to write in their religion. Some people may have chosen to describe a denomination of one of the tick-box responses (for example, Catholic as a denomination of Christian or Orthodox as a denomination of Jewish) through the "Any other religion" write-in response option.

2011 Religion data

In 2011, an error in the processing of census data led to the number of usual residents in the “Religion not stated” category being overestimated by a total of 62,000 for the following three local authorities combined: Camden, Islington, and Tower Hamlets.

In February 2015, the ONS published corrected figures for estimates based on the tick-box classification. However, it could not be corrected for the detailed religion classification because the processing and relationships with other output variables are so complex.

For this reason, only apply comparisons for these three local authorities to the tick-box classification, using the corrected figures set out in the ONS 2011 Census products: Issues and corrections notice.

For this publication, where corrected figures for the tick-box classification from the 2011 Census are available, they have been used. Where they are not (for single year of age by sex), the ONS has used data from the CT0291_2011 commissioned table.