 My name's Chris Sibley and I'm the lead researcher for the New Zealand Attitudes and Value Study at the University of Auckland. And this is Joseph Babilia from the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies down at Victoria University of Wellington. In this video, we're going to talk to you about feedback from one particular publication from the New Zealand Attitudes and Value Study. And this is one of the first big papers from the study looking at change in New Zealanders over time. So we're putting this video up on the website, mainly as a way to try and say thank you to all of the people who've taken part in the study. So thank you if you have taken part in the study and we really hope you continue to participate because the study is about to go into its fourth year of data collection. So it's really starting to get exciting with the different findings that we're discovering. What we're going to talk to you about today is looking at change in religion in the New Zealand population and particularly in relation to the horrific earthquake that's happened in Christchurch. So I'm going to pass over to Joe to talk about that now. Well thanks Chris and I'm just going to say how I got interested in this. So I study religion and Chris set up the NZADS to see how attitudes and values are changing over time. And in particular I was interested in how religion is changing over time. And one thing that came out of the data on the NZADS is just the magnitude of suffering and difficulty that people encountered in Christchurch after the earthquake. So that was a really tough thing. And so what we want to do is sort of think about what resources are available to people in the wake of a natural disaster of this sort of magnitude. So we're interested in the people of Christchurch but we're also interested in really contributing some sort of knowledge that would be helpful to people who might encounter a similar kind of difficulty. Now one thing that philosophers and theologians have debated about for centuries is just the role of religion in the wake of extremely traumatic experiences. Some people say that religion is a kind of comfort and it helps people to get through times of exceptional difficulty. And others say that religion is really sort of like provokes anxiety or increases anxiety or it's about getting people to do things which are not quite good for them. And it's really an open question whether or not being religious really brings any kind of comfort to people. And the second question is even though we might be drawn to religion at times of exceptional crisis, well does being religious help us in any kind of way? So these two questions are different so we could be attracted to religion at times of crisis but it could be something that really makes no difference. So as we think about the Christchurch earthquake we can begin to think in light of the responses that you people have given to us, we can begin to look at how religion changes in people both before and after the earthquake in Christchurch and elsewhere in New Zealand. We can begin to see what it is about religion if anything that helps people to move forward. So I'll hand over to Christy who's going to talk about our results. The data we're analysing here is from the first phase of the New Zealand attitudes and values study which was collected in 2009. So back before the Christchurch earthquakes occurred and we matched the people that completed that phase of the study with those who also participated again in 2011 last year. So after the Christchurch earthquakes had occurred and in total we had about 4,000 people who completed both of those two questionnaires two years apart. And the questions we were interested in looking at in those two surveys related to people's religious affiliation, so the exact wording of the question for those who took part in the study was do you identify or affiliate I believe with a religious or spiritual group? And people simply said yes or no to that and if they said yes we asked them what group specifically. And we also asked people just to give a simple rating on a scale from 1 to 10 of their satisfaction with their overall level of health. Was their health very good or was their health very poor or was their health somewhere in the middle? And by doing that we could look at changes in people's perception of their own health. So their subjective rating of their health over time and we could match whether that paralleled or coincided with any sort of change in their religious affiliation over time. Whether people had found God or become religious over time or whether people had always been religious over that period of time. Whether they had been non-religious consistently over that period of time. We also had another very important variable which is that we knew which region of the country people were in. So we knew whether people lived in the Christchurch region or we knew whether they lived in other regions of the country. We also knew from subsequent questionnaires whether people had been personally affected by the earthquakes because we asked them that too. And a fair few people of course all around the country said they had. So this allowed us to look at change over time and subjective ratings of health and how that would coincide with religion. So the first figure that I'm going to show you figure one shows levels of or percentages of the percentage of people who affiliated with different religious groups in 2009 and again in 2011. And as you can see we've presented two identical figures or near identical figures. The top one splits people up by region of the country. And here we're comparing the Canterbury region on the left with everywhere else in the country groups together on the right. And what you see is that people were more likely to convert to a religious group or to find faith if they lived in the Christchurch or Canterbury region relative to other regions of the country. So something different happened in Christchurch to religious affiliation. If you look at the lower half of that figure you see exactly the same pattern when you split people up by whether or not they said they were personally affected by the Christchurch earthquakes. Regardless of whether they themselves still lived in the Christchurch region or not. So of course these two overlap a lot. People in the Christchurch region were far more likely to say they were affected by the quakes. And these two measures are strong when you put them together because they tap slightly different aspects of this effect. And in both cases what you see is religious affiliation increased in the Canterbury region and for those affected by the earthquakes relative to the rest of the country. Their religion grew. Our second set of analyses looked at change in ratings of health. And what you can see in this figure are people's overall ratings of their satisfaction with their health in 2009 and then two years later in 2011. And this is split up for people who said they had been personally affected by the earthquakes versus those who had not. And it's also separated for people who were consistently religious. That is they said they were religious in 2009 and they were also religious in 2011. And as you can see in the left side of this figure for people who were religious and across that period of time whether or not they were affected by the earthquakes had no effect on their ratings of health. They were massively consistent. We don't see any change there for people who were religious. We also don't see any change as you can see in the middle figure for people who were non-religious. In fact their ratings of health are the same as people who were religious. We don't see change over time in their health ratings. They're very stable and it doesn't make any difference to their overall ratings of health as to depending on whether or not they were affected by the Christchurch earthquake. So this is very interesting because you would expect people's ratings of health satisfaction with their health their subjective wellbeing to have dropped following the earthquakes. Certainly I think a lot of people would have thought this and you would also expect or a lot of scholars have argued that religion may have these protective effects for health and wellbeing in some cases. What we see is a rather different pattern of results in New Zealand. And as you can see in the very right figure we do see a drop in people's ratings of health for one specific group of New Zealanders affected by the earthquake. And these are the people who lost their faith. These are the people who in 2009 said yes I am religious and by 2011 when we sampled them again said no I'm no longer religious or no I'm not religious at this point in time. And for people who had changed from being religious to being non-religious over this two year period from 2009 to 2011 for those people if they had been affected by the earthquakes we see this quite dramatic drop in their rating of their health. And this drop is statistically significant at the 5% level. Okay I'm going to pass back to Joe to talk about the practical side of this result. Well let me just recap some of the interest of these findings. And so remember our first question was the question of whether going through and enduring the agony of a horrible natural disaster would affect religious faith and in which direction. So although the Anglican cathedral was smashed by the earthquake although the Catholic cathedral was destroyed although a third of the properties in Christchurch were damaged beyond repair and although so many people lost their livelihoods and although nearly 200 people lost their lives we find that there is this increase in religious faith in this area. Now that is interesting because what we find in the country wide data and what's supported by census data over a 60 year period is just increasing declines in religious faith. So we find that across New Zealand people tend to be moving out of religious affiliation but in Christchurch we found a market shift in the opposite direction. So that was quite interesting. So the second finding remember our question was well what does having a religious faith do for us? And here we find something quite interesting. What we find is that having religious faith appears to have some sort of buffering effect so that if you had a religion before the earthquake and you had a religion after the earthquake your experience of subjective health will be similar. But what we also found and this is quite interesting in the context of New Zealand a place that has communities outside of churches is that if you were not religious before the earthquake your experience of subjective well-being would be similar after the earthquake. Now that suggests to us that there's something about these communities outside of churches which may be doing work in supporting people. This suggestion by the way is supported by this subjective reports that we find in the data. So when people are reporting about what it is that is supporting them within their communities they're talking about other people. And so we find this both in the church context and we find it outside of church. But what we do find and what I think is very important is we find this signature or signal of declining well-being among that group of people who lost their religion. So we're really interested in thinking about who it is we want to look after in the context of a terrible natural disaster. There's something about this group of people who have lost their religious affiliation during the time of that earthquake that suggests to us that they're experiencing market declines in subjective well-being. And I think to me one of the interests of this sort of study is it points to the importance of listening to people over a period of many years and attending to what it is that's happening to them in the context of an entire country. And seeing what sort of changes are associated both with improvements, protection, buffering, and here we find both church and secular communities are doing something like that. But we also want to attend to the signals of suffering as well. And I think that we do find it in that group and it raises a whole lot of questions about why that is so, questions which we hope to address in future studies. So I think I'll just close my bit for thanking Chris for inviting me on to this project and thanking you all for participating in it. I think you've really helped me to address questions which are important to me, but I think you've also helped others with a kind of knowledge that we were able to provide in this study. So thank you. And I'll just add my thanks to that. I hope you've found this recording interesting. And if you are a participant in the New Zealand Attitudes and Value Study, then a special thank you to everybody who's been taking part in the study. And I hope you'll continue to do so. And I hope I'll be able to put up many more videos of findings that we can't really imagine in terms of what we're going to see and change over time. So cheers. Thanks.