Monday, January 28, 2008

British Social Attitudes Survey: Giving up the daily paper for premarital sex

The latest British Social Attitudes survey was published last week, and there's a very useful headline page plus a summary of each of the chapters here, if you don't have a couple of weeks of time and £50 spare for the full report.

Strangely, the headline figure is that 70% of us now think there's nothing wrong with sex before marriage, against 48% in 1984. Personally I'm surprised the figure is that low, there is clearly a bit more residual Christian morality around than we thought. However, most of those who think they shouldn't probably are - apparently though 80% of us know driving our cars is bad for the environment, only 45% are actually doing something about it.

The report also covers family life, gender roles, 'Britishness', politics, citizenship and use of the media. Those of us who read a daily paper have fallen from 77% to 50% since 1984, and the slack hasn't been taken up by the internet. Many more of us feel we're 'living comfortably', and unemployment has become almost invisible as an issue.

The report is based on interviews with over 3,000 people, so a decent sized sample, and lots to chew on.

No comments:

Post a Comment