Spiritual and religious beliefs and behaviour: data collected from 27/28-year-old offspring in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, 2019-2020.

Religious/spiritual belief and practices have sometimes been demonstrated to have positive associations with outcomes such as coping with serious illness, anxiety, depression, negative life events and general well-being, and therefore warrants consideration in many facets of health research. For example, increasing secularisation evidenced, particularly in the West, may reflect increasing rates of depression and anxiety. Very few studies have charted the ways in which religious/spiritual beliefs and practices of parents and their offspring vary longitudinally or between generations. Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is one such study that can relate belief and practices with aspects of physical and mental health and/or distinguish the different facets of the environment that may influence the development, or inter-generational loss, of belief and behaviours. This paper describes the 2019–2020 data collection in the ALSPAC on the religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviours (RSBB) of the study offspring (born 1991/1992) at ages 27–28 years. Previously collected and new data on the offspring are described here and comparisons are made with identical data completed by their parents (mothers and their partners) in early 2020. The most striking observations are that in almost all aspects of RSBB the offspring of both sexes are more secular, especially when compared with their mothers. For example, 56.2% of offspring state that they do not believe in God, or a divine power compared with 26.6% of mothers and 45.3% of mothers’ partners. When asked about their type of religion, 65.4% of participants stated ‘none’, compared with 27.2% of mothers and 40.2% of partners. This confirms previous research reporting increasing secularisation from one generation to the next. As with the mothers and their partners, female offspring were more likely than males to believe in a divine power and to practice their beliefs.


Introduction
Prior research has shown a steady decline in religious affiliation over time, dramatic increases in those stating they had no religion and a steady increase in non-Christian beliefs (e.g., Chaves, 2017;Office of National Statistics, 2012;The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2017).Younger generations demonstrate an increased tolerance of others' beliefs, including non-belief (e.g., Curtice et al., 2019).Most previous research has been cross-sectional and indicates that religious belief can be associated with positive health outcomes (see Koenig et al., 2011), including reduced anxiety and depression (Idler & Kasl, 1997).Increasing rates of depression and anxiety reported in younger generations (e.g., Collishaw et al., 2009;Duffy et al., 2019) may reflect the increasing secularisation evidenced particularly in the north-west of Europe, and increasingly, in the USA (Chaves, 2017;Office of National Statistics, 2012;The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2017).This paper describes the data concerning religious and spiritual beliefs and behaviours (RSBB) collected in 2019/2020 from the offspring (aged 27-28 years) of the original mothers enrolled during pregnancy in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).Questions were designed to establish relationships with other longitudinal data from the cohort including traumatic incidents, physical and mental health, and genetic background.Research is planned to investigate various aspects of the antecedents and consequences of RSBB, and changes over time.A companion paper describes the RSBB data collected on the parents in 2020 (Iles-Caven et al., 2021).
The data collected will be of importance in unravelling the current extent of influence of parents, peers, educational establishments, and organised religion on the beliefs and behaviours of the participants.As Hood and colleagues summarised , most research to date has been descriptive rather than explanatory (Hood et al., 2018).The data may also be used to assess genetic influences on RSBB which have been demonstrated previously in, for example, the Minnesota Twins study: whereby monozygotic and dizygotic twins who were brought up separately showed that 49% of the variation in religious measure scores appeared to be a function of heredity (Waller et al., 1990).

Participants
ALSPAC was specifically designed to determine ways in which the individual's genotype combines with environmental pressures to influence health and development [Golding et al., 2001].The study is geographically based in the south-west of England, centred around the city of Bristol and its surrounding rural and semi-urban areas, with a population of about one million.To capture as much valid information as possible, unbiased by knowledge of details of the characteristics of the baby, the study was designed to start as early in pregnancy as possible.All women resident in the area at the time they were pregnant were eligible, provided that their expected date of delivery lay between 1 st April 1991 and 31 st December 1992.Pregnant mothers (n=14,541), resident in the area, were recruited into the ALSPAC study.From these pregnancies, there were a total of 14,676 fetuses and 14,062 live births.Of the children, 13,988 were still alive at one year of age (Boyd et al., 2013).
Following advice from the ALSPAC Ethics and Law Committee, partners were recruited into the study only if the mothers wished them to be included.Questionnaires were sent to the mother who then passed the questionnaire on to the partner with a separate pre-paid return envelope.This method meant that the ALSPAC team were unable to follow up or communicate directly with the partners (Birmingham, 2018;Fraser et al., 2013).Therefore, the numbers of partners' questionnaires returned were less than those received from the mothers.Around 75% of partners participated in the study.Partners were subsequently enrolled in their own right in 2010 (n=3000).
Major recruitment drives at the ages of seven and 18 years plus opportunistic contacts since age 7 enrolled additional eligible offspring.A total of 913 additional offspring participants have been enrolled in the study since the age of seven years with 195 of these joining since age 18.This additional enrolment provides a baseline sample of 14,901 offspring participants who were alive at one year of age.Of these 8964 were at known addresses, had not refused to take part, and were sent questionnaires (Northstone et al., 2019).
Since the offspring participants were aged 22 years, data have been collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at the University of Bristol (Harris et al., 2009).REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based software platform designed to support data capture for research studies.
In summary, data have been collected from pregnancy onwards using a variety of methods: (a) self-completion questionnaires; (b) assays of biological samples; (c) hands-on examination of the subjects; (d) linkage to educational and health data on the individuals; (e) linkage of addresses to measures of geographic exposures; (f) information on schools attended with details of behaviour of the child and his/her parents completed by teachers and head teachers.
Previous data collection on religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviour (RSBB) in the children Unlike the enrolled mothers and their partners who were asked about their RSBB on several occasions as described elsewhere (Iles- Caven et al., 2019;Iles-Caven et al., 2021), only a

Amendments from Version 1
We have added a couple of sentences to the end of the third paragraph of the Methods explaining the total number of participants to whom questionnaires were sent.Additionally, we have inserted a third paragraph to the Strengths and Limitations reiterating that this data note describes the data available and that it is up to the researcher to decide the best way to deal with missing data.
Any further responses from the reviewers can be found at the end of the article few questions were asked of the mother concerning the child's RSBB at the ages of 5, 9 and 11 years, and directly of the child at ages 16 and 18 years.Table 1 shows the frequency of responses to these questions.At age 5, frequency of Sunday School (a class held by a faith organisation) attendance was reported with 16% attending at least weekly; this compares with 7.8% at age 11.When asked whether the child took an interest in the meaning of life, there was a slight increase in 'very interested' and 'somewhat interested' between the ages of 9 and 11.This contrasted with those who took an interest in religion which decreased over the same period with a corresponding rise in the 'no interest' group from 32.2% to 40%.Similar decreases in worship attendance and praying are also evident.By age 11, 16.6% of mothers reported they were unsure whether their child prayed or not, compared with 8.8% at 9 years.At age 16 the child was asked if they participated in religious groups/organisations both within school (3.4% did so) and outside of school (7.2% did so).By the age of 18 years, only 10% had attended a place of worship within the previous four weeks (Table 1).
Table 2 describes the characteristics of those offspring participants who completed the RSBB questions.Women were more likely to complete the questionnaire than men, and the majority of respondents were educated to degree level.By 2020, many respondents were parents themselves (biological,  et al., 2021), and comprised the original questions asked of the mothers and their partners over time, plus elements from well-validated, standardised scales (shown in bold in Table 3).In brief, these scales are: (i) The Duke University Religion Scale (DUREL) (Koenig et al., 1997), a five-item measure of religious involvement developed for use in large studies.
(ii) Specific questions to elicit extrinsic and intrinsic religious motivation were included that had been adapted so they could be answered by non-believers (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989).We used two of the extrinsically weighted items in our questionnaires (see Table 3, questions C17 and C18).
(iii) Three questions (see  2003).These enquire whether an individual has had a religious/spiritual experience that changed their life or experienced a significant gain or loss of faith and if so at what age and to describe the event.
As can be seen from Table 4, young women were more likely than men to attend organised religious worship and to practice private worship (e.g., prayer).Female participants scored slighter higher means on the DUREL scale (4.55 vs. 4.24).
Table 5 shows the responses to each question by sex of the respondent.There is evidence to suggest that young women are more likely than the men to believe in a divine power, and more likely to participate in religious behaviours.This repeats the pattern we found for their mothers compared with the mothers' partners (Iles-Caven et al., 2021).
Comparisons of the responses to the RSBB questions of the offspring with those of their parents are shown in Table 6.Dramatic differences can be observed between them and their mothers.More than half of the offspring (56.2%) answering the question "Do you believe in God or some divine power?", stated that they did not believe (compared with 26.6% of their   mothers and 45.3% of partners).Responses to the question concerning type of religion indicate that 65.4% of offspring stated 'none', compared with 27.2% of their mothers and 40.2% of partners.74.4% of offspring stated they never attend a place of worship compared with 49.8% of their mothers and 58.0% of their partners.In answer to the question "How important to you is religion or spirituality?",63.6% of offspring stated it was not important to them at all (compared with 39.2% of their mothers and 54.7% of the mothers' partners).Slightly more offspring (5%) had had their current faith for ≤5years compared with their mothers (1.7%) or the mothers' partners (1.6%).These results reflect previous research indicating sex differences in RSBB (Coursey et al., 2013;Fiori et al., 2006) and increased secularism with each new generation (e.g., Twenge et al., 2015).

Strengths and limitations of the data
The strengths of these data include the large sample size, with ~4500 participants with data available from the 2019-2020 sweep, with comparable longitudinal RSBB data on their parents.The participants at birth were broadly representative of the general population in the area at the time of recruitment in terms of sex, ethnicity, and socio-economic status (Fraser et al., 2013).
A key limitation of the data is the lack of ethnic diversity.At the time of enrolment, the county of Avon was mainly Caucasian, therefore there were too few Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) participants (<6% in the area) to allow for detailed analysis by ethnic background.Indeed, of the offspring participating in the 2020 sweep, <4% were non-white.
The major limitation is that, as with all longitudinal studies there is increasing attrition over time, in particular males and those with lower levels of education were less likely to still be taking part in the study in their late twenties.
In this paper we do not advise on the appropriate techniques for accounting for missing data.Rather we have described the RSBB data collected on the study offspring so that interested researchers can use tools that they deem appropriate.

Ethical approval and consent
Prior to commencement of the study, approval was sought from the ALSPAC Ethics and Law Committee and the Local Research Ethics Committees.Informed consent for the use of data collected via questionnaires and clinics was obtained from participants following the recommendations of the ALSPAC Ethics and Law Committee at the time.Questionnaires were completed in the participants own home and return of the questionnaires was taken as continued consent for their data to be included in the study.Full details of the approvals obtained are available from the study website.Study members have the right to withdraw their consent for elements of the study or from the study entirely at any time.
Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?

Rodrigo Toniol
University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil This article discusses spiritual and religious beliefs and behaviors in young adults.It discusses how these beliefs have changed over time and examines how the beliefs of young adults differ from those of their parents.The study found that young adults are more likely to be non-religious than their parents.They are also less likely to attend religious services or pray.For the authors, these findings suggest a trend toward secularization in Western societies.
The text is a testament to the author's meticulous research and robust methodology, which is evident in the alignment of its conclusions with the data obtained.While the extensive discussion in the social sciences about the process of secularization in Western societies could have been a valuable addition to the article, I acknowledge that it falls outside the scope of the authors' area.
Nevertheless, this text is poised to make a significant contribution to future discussions on secularization, bolstered by its rigorous research and compelling findings.
Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?The effect of Religious and Spiritual Believe and Behavior (RSBB) has been shown to sometimes have positive associations with both physical and mental outcomes.
Very few studies have examined how parents and offspring RSBB vary between generations and over time.This study is one of the few existing studies that has the potential to compare the RSBB's role of the offspring with those of their mother and mother's partner.
As noted by the authors, while most studies on this topic are descriptive, the data collected here can be viewed as explanatory and used to assess the effects of parents, peers, and educational establishments on the beliefs and behaviors of the participants.
A further strength of the study is the size of the sample -over 4500 offspring participated in this study in 2019/2020 when the offspring were 27/28 years old.There are half as many males as female offspring in the sample and it is unclear whether the sample consisted of fewer males who responded or whether equal proportions of males and females responded, but there were more females overall in the sample than males.
The datasets appear to be clearly presented in a useable and accessible format, although I have not had direct access to the datasets.
A limitation of the paper, besides the lack of ethnic diversity in the sample, is the lack of discussion regarding attrition over time.It is unclear what should be considered the core sample of offspring and how missing data should be handled.Not accounting for missing data could result in biased estimates.
Also, there are many gaps in time over the longitudinal data.Have the authors considered imputing the missing data?
Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?Yes Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?Yes

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Partly
Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

Yes
Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Reviewer Expertise: Psychiatry, Public Health and Biostatistics.Published several articles on religion.
I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.
Author Response 23 Nov 2022

Yasmin Iles-Caven
Firstly, we would like to thank this reviewer for their useful comments, and we have responded to these: You wrote: ....A further strength of the study is the size of the sample -over 4500 offspring participated in this study in 2019/2020 when the offspring were 27/28 years old.There are half as many males as female offspring in the sample and it is unclear whether the sample consisted of fewer males who responded or whether equal proportions of males and females responded, but there were more females overall in the sample than males.
Response: The original births recruited to the ALSPAC study (and through subsequent recruitment phases) comprised 14,901 babies alive by age 1 year.Of these, 13,268 are still 'active' (i.e. they have not withdrawn), however, 8964 have agreed to be invited to complete questionnaires but not all do complete them (see Northstone et al., 2019 https://doi.org/10.12688%2Fwellcomeopenres.15132.1) As we point out in the Strengths & Limitations section, whilst the original babies were roughly 50/50 split on sex at birth, over the years it is the girls/women who are more likely to stay engaged with the study and hence the sex differences responding to the RSBB questionnaires at 27/28, with 65.8% of respondents being female.The study is also currently biased to higher education level, higher SES level and religious affiliation, but there are methods that could be used to overcome such biases such as multiple imputation or inverse-probability weighting.
You wrote: A limitation of the paper, besides the lack of ethnic diversity in the sample, is the lack of discussion regarding attrition over time.It is unclear what should be considered the core sample of offspring and how missing data should be handled.Not accounting for missing data could result in biased estimates.
Response: The question as to what constitutes the core sample depends on the research question.Some authors who are interested in changes over time will use all those born to the women who were enrolled in the study; others will consider 8964 as the 'core' sample, to whom invitations to complete questionnaires are sent (slightly more have also indicated they would be interested in invitations to the face-to-face clinics).Roughly 50% of these complete questionnaires.This paper merely describes the data available, and it will be up to any researchers wishing to analyse the data how they handle missingness.
You wrote: Also, there are many gaps in time over the longitudinal data.Have the authors considered imputing the missing data?
Response: Age 27/28 has been the only occasion that the G1 cohort (the offspring) have had as detailed information collected on them as on their parents (G0).Whilst one can compare the offspring during childhood with their parents' RSBB at a similar time point, one cannot really fill in the missing data on RSBB, but again this would be up to the any researchers using this data to use the most suitable method(s) (e.g.imputation) for their analyses.

Peter Hill
Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, La Mirada, CA, USA The obvious value of this data set is its size, longitudinal nature, and the fact that it involves multiple respondents (offspring, mothers, mothers' partners) for comparison purposes.This report further documents what has already been established in the literature that 1) the younger generation is more secularized than both mothers and mothers' partners, 2) females are more religious than males, and 3) children become more disaffiliated with religion from the time they are in elementary school to the time of their adolescence, but does so based on a rich data set that, despite its ethnic and geographic limitations, is unmatched in terms of longitudinal longevity than any other data set available.Furthermore, the measures used for the data are diverse and cover many constructs that make the data valuable for other researchers to mine.The data set is clearly presented.

Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described? Yes
Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?Yes

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Yes
Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?Yes Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Reviewer Expertise: Psychology religion and spirituality, especially measurement I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

Competing Interests:
None Reviewer Report 20 September 2021 https://doi.org/10.21956/wellcomeopenres.18946.r45638© 2021 Hill P.This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Table 2 . Selected demographics of the offspring participants responding to the 2019-2020 religious and spiritual beliefs and behaviours questions according to sex.
299 (6.5%) were returned after the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, which took place on 23 rd March.The majority of responders (3801, 82.9%) completed the online version (the remainder (n= 783) returned a paper version through the post).The measures used are described in detail elsewhere (Iles-Caven

Table 3
, questions C19-C23) are from the well-validated Fetzer Brief Multi-Dimensional Measure of Religiosity/Spirituality for use in health research (BMMRS) (Fetzer Institute & National Institute on Aging Working Group,

Table 3 . Questions (numbered as in the questionnaire) asked of the participants in the 2019-2020 sweep, with their variable names. Items forming
various validated scales are indicated in bold.
YPG3050 C7.Were you brought up in this faith?Yes/No/If no, please describe what faith if any YPG3060 C8.Would/Are you bringing your child(ren) up in your current faith/belief (including none)?Yes this faith/No.If no, what faith did you bring your children up in, if any? YPG3070 C9.How often do you go to a place of worship or other religious meetings?Yes, at least once a week/Yes, at least once/month/Yes, at least once a year/Not at all YPG3080 DUREL C10.Do you obtain help and support: -From leaders of your religious group?Yes/No YPG3090 -From other members of your religious group?Yes/No YPG3091 -From leaders of other religious groups (please describe)?Yes/No YPG3092 -From members of other religious groups (please describe)?Yes/No YPG3093 C11.How often do you spend time in private religious activities, such as prayer, meditation, or holy scripture study?More than once a day/Daily/2+times a week/Once a week/Few times a month/Rarely or never YPG3100 DUREL C12.How often do you listen to/watch religious programming on the radio/ television/social media?Daily/Several times a week/Several times a month/Occasionally/ Never/ Please describe YPG3110 C13.How often do you read religious related texts or publications (e.g. the Bible, the Koran, prayer book, Watchtower, The War Cry, The Friend, Spirituality & Health, Catholic Digest) Daily/Several times a week/Several times a month/Occasionally/ Never/Please describe YPG3120 C14.In my life, I experience the Presence of the Divine (e.g.God) Definitely true of me/Tends to be true of me/Unsure/Tends not to be true of me/Definitely not true of me/Not applicable YPG3130 DUREL

Intrinsic C15. My religious beliefs are what really lie behind my whole approach to life. Definitely
true of me/Tends to be true of me/Unsure/ Tends not to be true of me/Definitely not true of me/Not applicable YPG3140 DUREL

Intrinsic C16. I try hard to carry my religion over into all other dealings in life. Definitely
true of me/Tends to be true of me/Unsure/Tends not to be true of me/Definitely not true of me/Not applicable

attend a place of worship mainly because it helps me make friends
: Strongly agree/Mildly agree/Not sure/Mildly disagree/ Strongly disagree/Not applicable YPG3160 Extrinsic C18.I pray mainly to gain relief and protection.Strongly agree/Mildly agree/Not sure/Mildly disagree/Strongly disagree/Not applicable YPG3170 Extrinsic C19.

To what extent do you consider yourself a religious person
? Very/Moderately/Slightly/Not at all YPG3210 Fetzer C23.To what extent do you consider yourself a spiritual person?Very/Moderately/Slightly/Not at all YPG3220 Fetzer C24.How important to you is religion or spirituality?Highly/Moderately/Slightly/Not important at all YPG3230

Table 4 . Duke University Religion Scale (DUREL) derived variables
. (P values are the probability that the responses for males and females are similar).

Table 6 . Comparison of beliefs and behaviours between offspring and parents in 2019/2020.
*Not sure/not applicable options added to 2019/2020 sweep only and did not appear in prior mothers/partners' questionnaires.

Yes Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound? Yes Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Yes Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format? Yes Competing Interests:
No competing interests were disclosed.

have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.
This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Yes Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound? Yes Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Yes Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format? Yes Competing Interests:
No competing interests were disclosed.

have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. Version 1
This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.