Religious attitudes among British older people: stability and change in a 20-year longitudinal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Britain along with other western European countries has seen a marked decrease in allegiance to traditional forms of Christianity during the latter part of the 20th century. Although church attendance remains relatively high among older people compared with younger age groups, there has been little or no investigation into the stability or change of people's religious belief and practice with increasing age. This paper present findings on these issues from the Southampton Ageing Project, which from 1977–78 to 2002 followed 342 people almost all of whom had had an entirely Christian religious education and all of whom at the outset were aged 65 or more years. Although religion has continued to have considerable meaning in the lives of up to one-half of the participants, approximately one-quarter of the sample expressed a declining commitment to a religious faith and to church membership. The participants' accounts of their recent life experiences, for example following bereavement, give instances of disappointment with the support that they received from institutional religion and show that this was a factor in their declining adherence. They also provide suggestions for further investigation into the origin of this decline. The conclusion argues that the study of older people's religious and spiritual beliefs and practice should be integrated with the investigation of self and identity and of sources of existential meaning in later life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".