Influences on Students' Views on Religions and Education in England and Estonia

Structural modelling offers an overall pattern of relationships; this paper looks at differences in students' attitude structures between England and Estonia. Where different coherent sets of beliefs exist in a national sample, factor analysis, which focuses on sets of responses which differ between groups, should be able to separate them out. England and Estonia differ both in the composition of the factors, indicating differences in the patterns of viewpoints between the students in the two countries, and in the interrelation between the factors and influences. In England, the first factor indicates attitude differences between the religiously "committed" and the uncommitted, but in Estonia this is only the second factor, despite the importance of religion to the "Russians". In Estonia the first, integrative, factor relates to religious education, which evokes much more divergence of opinion than in the English data. In the structural model, the most striking differences relate to the stronger differences in belief in Estonia, the greater influence of "language spoken" in England and the effect of "RE model" only in Estonia. However, the Estonian data indicate that individual influences on "commitment" reduce the effect of "RE model", a group-level influence. (Contains 3 notes and 2 figures.)