The debate about the ARINS survey has at least brought some clarity

Colin Coulter is Professor of Sociology in Maynooth University, and the coordinator of the inaugural Maynooth Festival of Palestinian Culture.

While the exchanges on Slugger about the ARINS survey have been useful, they have, for the time being at least, run their course. The chances are, though, that the debates about the series will continue elsewhere.

For me, they have clarified the following issues that might not otherwise have come to light:

• Different methodologies have been employed at different stages, without making that clear to readers of their findings. Most critically, the series has used different bases in different years for estimating the religious affiliation of their sample population. The result has been a 7.2% shift in the balance between Catholic and Protestant respondents in the space of just two years. That can only have had a significant impact.
• Weightings for party political affiliation have been introduced that are at odds with actual voting trends. In the latest edition, electoral preference is based not on a real election that happened recently, but a fictional election happening ‘tomorrow’, so that a 2.4% advantage for the three largest unionist parties becomes a 9.2% advantage for the two principal nationalist parties. Support for Sinn Féin alone grows some 7.4% over a single summer. Again, that can only have had a significant impact.
• Data sets were not available for a long period of time and documents explaining the methodologies employed are only appearing now, well over two years into the project. Those practices are at odds with protocols about how to archive and disseminate data and have, therefore, invited useful questions about how the project has been conducted.

The prospect of the debate about the ARINS survey continuing elsewhere has become all the more likely given the recent intervention of An Taoiseach in the Belfast Telegraph. In conversation with Sam McBride, Micheál Martin identified a ‘contrived approach’ that presumes only one possible ‘end goal’ in the debate on Northern Ireland’s future.

The ‘project from Notre Dame’ – the host university funding ARINS – is mentioned specifically in this context. It is going to be very interesting indeed to see how – and, indeed, if – the ARINS academics respond to such damning criticism from such an unlikely, but influential, source.

A final word. When surveys of political opinion are recording trends clearly at odds with those being found elsewhere, that should prompt all of us to look more closely and critically at how those data have been produced. That holds true even when the numbers being recorded happen to be rather convenient to our wider view of the world.

Soapbox

This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.