The Purpose of the Research

The purpose of the research was to ask senior students at four Catholic high schools the Alister Hardy question - "Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your every day world?"

In surveying the students, questions on religion were separated from those on the experiences themselves. The experiences were defined as "limit" experiences. These are defined as experiences that reveal a reality of life beyond the self, beyond the here and now. Reports of such experiences may point to a recognition of our own fragility and vulnerability as much as a joyous awareness of a reality beyond our normal encounter with life.

Comparative Results

The sample was heavily Catholic in origin (around 70%). The
demographics of these Catholic schools contrasted with those sampled in more extensive surveys by Flynn (1975, 1985, 1993). Flynn was working with populations that were over 90% Catholic in each of his
samples.

Levels of church attendance provide a major contrast to Flynn's earlier work. Flynn (1993) had documented that weekly attendance had fallen from 83% in his early 1970s survey gradually down to 66% by the early 1990s. In the group surveyed in 2000, it was closer to 13%.

Personal faith patterns had also changed over the last twenty years as shown in table 2 on page 6. However, the moral values of the students showed a remarkable level of similarity with Flynn's (1985) cohort, but with an increased awareness of worldwide problems.

The survey was designed in segments. The first three collected basic information about the students. The fourth segment asked questions about the values and attitudes of the students. Many of the questions had been asked by Flynn (1975, 1985, 1993) in his three major surveys of some Australian schools, each about a decade apart over the past thirty years. Others had been asked by Robinson and Jackson (1987) in some of their work with students in
Britain.

The final two segments were central to the research. They consisted of direct questions on the types of experiences that the students had and descriptive passages on various types of experiences. The intention was to focus the students on their
own experiences and encourage them to write an account of their
experiences at the end of the survey. To a large extent this was successful. Around 40% of those who completed the survey also chose to write an account of their own experiences.

Reports of Limit Experience

The questions on limit experience were asked in two ways. Some questions were direct, such as: "Sometimes I have felt a guiding presence from a friend or relative who has died." Students were asked to respond on a one to five scale that ranged from "certainly false" through to "certainly true" at the top of the scale.

The descriptive passage responses ranged on a scale from one to four; from "never - no I've never had such an experience" to "yes, definitely, I have had such an experience" at the top of the scale. The questions were
chosen so as to have at least one question that paralleled one of the
types of experience identified by Hay (1987) in his studies of religious experience in the UK.

Hay (1987) had identified eight types of experiences found in the general population in Britain. Overall, 48 per cent reported having had one or more of these types of experiences. However in later work, The Soul of Britain Survey (Hay and Hunt, 2000), he found 76 per cent affirming one or other of these experiences.

It is standard practice when using scales like this to regard as a positive response either a four or a five on a five-point scale, or a score of three or four on the four point scale. When the survey of student (2000) responses were interpreted in this way they gave a positive response rate of over 93%. That is, 93% of the students actually responded positively to at least one of the eleven items included on "limit" experience in the survey. This response rate (for practical purposes virtually the whole of the cohort) had to be tightened to allow further analysis. In later work
only responses at the top of each of the scales was accepted as positive.

These strengthened criteria gave a response rate close to 76% of the cohort. That is, almost 76% of these students had responded at the highest possible level to at least one of the eleven questions on limit experience in the survey. The types of experiences they reported resembled the Hay (1987) categories.

Exploratory analyses, too detailed to outline here, examined the links between the values and attitudes of the students and the types of experience reported. They also explored the links between these
experiences and home background, school subjects and type of school attended.

Paul McQuillan
References

Flynn, M. (1975). Some catholic schools in action. Sydney: Catholic Education Office.

Flynn, M. (1985). The effectiveness of catholic Schools. Homebush, NSW: St Paul Publications.

Flynn, M. (1993). The culture of catholic schools. Homebush, NSW: St Paul Press.

Hay, D. (1987). Exploring inner space - Is God still possible in the twentieth century?. Oxford: A.R. Mowbray.

Hay, D. & Hunt, K. (2000). Is Britain's soul waking up?. The Tablet, 846.

Note
Dr Paul McQuillan's research interest is the phenomenon of
experiences that people might interpret as religious. He has been a
system administrator, Principal and teacher in Catholic schools in
four states and territories. The results have been presented in
more detail at recent seminars for the Alister Hardy society at
Oxford and for the Religious Education Faculty at the University of
Birmingham.