Background of the SOCON 2005 survey

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 2005 as part of general research program on social and cultural developments in the Netherlands. This cross-sectional survey is a replication and extension of five previous surveys that can be used to ascertain and analyse social trends in Dutch society from 1979-2005.

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 non-religious attitudes and behaviours in contemporary Dutch society. Its documentation Religion in Dutch Society by Felling et al. (1986) and the corresponding data (in SPSS format) were made available to other researchers and were stored at Data Archiving and Networked Services – DANS.

In the early 1980s, plans were made to replicate the 1979 research and to extent its scope by including attitudes and behaviours on a wider range of social issues. In early 1984, a group of social scientists was invited to participate in the design of a large-scale research program, called Social and Cultural Developments in the Netherlands 1985 (SOCON 85). For this cross-sectional survey, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education and Science, a sample of respondents aged 18 to 70 were randomly selected from the general Dutch population for personal interview in the autumn of 1985. Major substantive areas of SOCON 85 include religion, value systems, work attitudes, ethnocentrism, political attitudes and political participation, health issues and conservatism. To enable researchers to engage in additional work on the data, the SOCON 85 data (in SPSS format) and the codebook Religion in Dutch Society 85 by Felling et al. (1987) were also stored at Data Archiving and Networked Services -DANS.

In the late 1980s, the principal investigators agreed to conduct two follow-up studies in 1990: a panel study and a new cross-sectional survey. Researchers who would like further information on this panel study are encouraged to consult the documentation in Individual changes in the Netherlands 1985–1990 by Felling et al. (1992). The new cross-sectional survey Social and Cultural Developments in the Netherlands 1990 (SOCON 90) was a partial replication of the 1979 and the 1985 surveys, supplemented by many new topics.