Social Identity in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In an attempt to explore the importance of various religious ethnic and political social identities in Northern Ireland, 991 young people (60% Protestants, 40% Catholics) were asked to choose among various bipolar adjectives and then to rank order the terms chosen. The results indicated that the Catholic-Protestant dimension was the most frequently chosen and most highly rated ethnopolitical category but that some cross-cutting occurred on all categories. Further, it was suggested that while the term Catholic may carry surplus meaning from the religious domain, the label Protestant may be rather more clearly thought of as a purely ethnopolitical term.

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