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Sexual Identity, Ethnicity and Religion - Experimental Results from the Integrated Household Survey, April 2009 to March 2010

Statistics on ‘Integrated Household Survey Statistical Bulletin 2010 - Experimental’ produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) were released on 23rd September 2010 according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

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

The survey is comprised of a core suite of questions from six current ONS household surveys and contains information from nearly 450,000 individual respondents across the UK, including 40,000 in Wales.

The statistical bulletin contains experimental statistics on Sexual Identity, Religion, Ethnicity and Perceived General Health. 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 key results are:

  • In Wales, 95.2 per cent of people identified as heterosexual/straight, 1.2 per cent as gay/lesbian or bisexual and 0.4 per cent as other. 3.2 per cent did not respond to this question. 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, 96.3 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, 68.9 per cent of people stated they were Christian, 28.0 per cent stated that they had no religion, 1.0 per cent of people stated they were Muslim whilst other religions accounted for 1.9  per cent of people. The results are generally lower than the results for GB, however, the percentage of people stating they have no religion was 7.5 percentage points higher than the GB result.

ONS intends to submit the survey for assessment to become a National Statistic by the UK Statistics Authority in 2012. Currently, the Annual Population Survey (APS) collects data on ethnicity and religion, as well as a large amount of other information. While the IHS statistics remain experimental, the APS will continue to be the official source for this information.

An evaluation report ‘Measuring Sexual Identity: Evaluation Report - Sexual Identity 2010’ has also been published. The report is based on the Integrated Household Survey (IHS) experimental data, collected between April 2009 - March 2010.

Revision note

The data in this headline was revised following reweighting of the Integrated Household Survey by the Office for National Statistics. The revised bulletin was published on 31 March 2011.

Further information

Office for National Statistics website.

Contact

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

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