Religion, volunteering, and reconciliation in Northern Ireland: A national study

<p>Abstract copyright data collection owner.</p>This dataset presented contains information from a telephone survey conducted in Dec 2005-Feb 2006 on a representative sample of 1500 Northern Irish adults. The survey sought to investigate the relationships between formal and voluntary work, religious identification and participation in small group activities, and reconciliation, as measured by perceptions of security and political forgiveness. This project seeks to determine the factors affecting the impact of small-scale community reconciliation projects (SCRPs), and to develop the capacity of these projects to evaluate their own work, hence improving their potential for self-development and communication with stakeholders. In Phase 1 focus groups and semi-structured interviews with SCRPs, larger Non-Governmental Organisations and local government actors will be used to develop an understanding of SCRP aims and objectives, and of best sector practice in evaluation. A telephone survey and analysis of extant sources of social data will assess the community impact of SCRPs more directly. In Phase 2, researchers will support SCRPs in evaluating project progress, in particular by identifying key stages and indices of progression, and hence develop a toolkit for self-evaluation. The analysis will draw on concepts in the fields of sociology, social policy, political science and religious studies, with the aim of contributing to the development of an integrated theoretical understanding of the Non-Governmental Organisation sector