The measurement of religious beliefs in ISSP and EVS surveys

Résumé 0

This chapter defends the legitimacy of measurements concerned with religious beliefs. It shows the difficulty of this measure but also its great interest. To do this, it compares some questions from the 1999 European Values Survey to the 1998 International Social Survey Programme (such as the belief in God, the strength and intensity of this belief, the belief in life after death, in Paradise, in Hell and the Devil). The comparison is carried out in eleven European countries. As the wording of questions is not the same in the two surveys, the results are not identical for a given country when the same dimension is measured. But, on the indicators of beliefs selected, the countries are classified in more or less the same order from the most to the least believing. And no matter whether the EVS or ISSP indicator is used, the same system of relationships can be observed with independent variables. The last part of the paper tries to explain how it would be possible to improve questionnaires about religion and shows what kind of knowledge will be bettered on this subject with the new 2008 ISSP survey.