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Sexual Identity, Ethnicity and Religion - Experimental Results from the Integrated Household Survey, April 2010 to March 2011

The latest statistics from the Integrated Household Survey produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) were released on 28th September 2011 according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

Statistics from the Integrated Household Survey include data on sexual  identity, religion, ethnicity and general health for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales for the period April 2010 to March 2011. The latest release updates the statistics previously released on 31st March 2011.

The Integrated Household Survey (IHS) is a composite household survey which aims to produce an experimental dataset of core variables in order to produce high-level estimates for particular themes such as sexual identity to a higher precision.

The 2010-2011 Integrated Household Survey is comprised of a core suite of questions from five current ONS household surveys and contains information from nearly 450,000 individual respondents across the UK, including 40,000 in Wales.

The sexual identity question was developed and tested on a number of surveys in 2008 and launched on the IHS in 2009. The IHS is the first ONS survey that has been used to produce data on sexual identity.

The IHS will be assessed for National Statistics status in 2012.

The key points from the latest release are:

  • In Wales, 94.2 per cent of people identified as heterosexual/straight, 1.2 per cent as gay/lesbian or bisexual and 0.3 per cent as other. 4.3 per cent did not respond to this question (1.4% didn't respond and 2.9% didn't know or refused to answer the question, compared to 0.9% and 2.3% respectively last year). The results are broadly similar to the results for the UK as a whole, though the non-response rate for Wales was higher than for the UK.
  • In Wales, 96.2 per cent of people identified as White, 1.6 per cent identified as Asian or Asian British and 2.2 per cent of people identified themselves in another ethnic group.
  • In Wales, 66.1 per cent of people stated they were Christian, 30.6 per cent stated that they had no religion, 1.2 per cent of people stated they were Muslim whilst other religions accounted for 2.2 per cent of people. The percentage of people stating they have no religion was 7.4 percentage points higher than the GB result.

Further information

Office for National Statistics website.

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 6023
E-mail: stats.popcensus@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Next update

September 2012 (provisional – to be confirmed on the Due Out Soon page)