“Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England” is a 3-year project that is studying the beliefs, values and social lives of Christian undergraduate students. We want to know how young people between the ages of 18 and 25 live out their faith identities while at university.

University is an important time in many young people’s lives. It is often where their attitudes and values, including religious ones, are developed and challenged. In the UK, Christians are the largest student faith group, and Christian groups (including Christian Unions, university chaplaincies and Catholic and Student Christian Movement groups) have long been present on university campuses.

However, we have discovered that there is almost no empirical research on Christianity amongst university students in England. With our study, we seek to fill this gap.

We want to know, what contributes to students' religious identities? Is it family background, friends, socio-economic status, choice of degree subject, church or faith group, and/or the context and environment of the university? Our study is attempting to find this out through a web-based national survey and one-to-one interviews in three contrasting case study universities. Focusing on a range of students, we will compare beliefs and values among different Christian constituencies.

Phase One and Two

The first phase of our project is now complete and involved a national survey of undergraduate students in English universities. The survey was administered via an online questionnaire and was launched at 5 universities across the country. The second phase of the survey is now almost complete. We launched the survey at 14 universities with the aim of achieving a representative sample from across the five major categories of Higher Education Institutions in England:

- - Traditional universities

- - Inner-city civic or 'red brick' universities established in the early twentieth century

- - Campus universities established during the 1960s

- - Post-1992 universities

- - Cathedrals Group universities which are in origin, church-founded training colleges

The online questionnaire has been sent to 3,000 randomly selected undergraduates from within each of the universities which have agreed to take part. The questionnaire is chiefly made up of multi-choice questions, but with a few open response questions included so that we can gather more subtle responses on particular issues. The questionnaire takes approximately 10 minutes to complete and includes questions which fall into 8 sections, the first five completed by all respondents, with an additional three included for completion by those students who describe themselves as ‘Christian’. This allows us to compare the beliefs and values of Christians with the beliefs and values of students of other faiths, or of none. The questions cover basic demographic information, university study and educational background, family background, social and moral values, attitudes towards religious matters, Christian devotional practice and Christian beliefs.  

If your university would like to participate

For more information on Phase One of the project, or if you represent a Higher Education Institution and would like your university to take part in the study, please contact Dr Sonya Sharma at sonya.sharma@durham.ac.uk

If you would like to take part in the project, please let us know as soon as possible and we can begin to make arrangements for this to happen in the Autumn term. The survey is based online and all we need to do is send 3 pre-composed emails to a random selection of 3,000 students from among the undergraduate body. Our experience so far has been that this is very straightforward and easy to arrange, taking no more than 20 minutes of an administrator’s time.  

In agreeing to take part each participating university will receive a research report of our findings tailored to their interests, and with a special focus on findings gathered from their own students. This will be issued well in advance of publication and members of the project team would be happy to supplement this with a face to face presentation of our results to interested parties at each university.

The following map shows the universities that are participating in CUE.

They are Durham, Cambridge, UCL, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Kent, Salford, Derby, Kingston, Staffordshire, Canterbury Christ Church, Chester and Winchester.