y to see England as a “green and pleasant land” – 60% of 18-24 year olds say the English countryside contributes strongly to their English identity, compared to fully 90% among 65+ year olds.
Likewise, “England’s Christian tradition” and “England’s history and heritage” are much less likely to contribute strongly to younger people’s sense of Englishness than their elders’ (22% vs 53% and 56% vs 89% respectively).
On the flip side, older people are less likely to consider England’s cultural diversity as a source of their Englishness – the majority (52%) of 65+ year olds say England’s diverse cultural life does not contribute strongly to their English identity (compared to 36% of 18-24 year olds).
Given the above, it is perhaps not too surprising that young people are more likely than the old to see England as a place of diversity (57% vs 47%), as well as one of modernity (20% vs 9%). For their part, older people are much more likely to consider it “a place where history, tradition and pageantry are important” (64% vs 37%), a world leader in innovation, industry and trade (49% vs 26%) and a nation that has been proud to stand alone (36% vs 16%).
Find out attitudes to England and Englishness in your council area
As part of this project YouGov, working in conjunction with Dr Kevin Cunningham and Dr Ian Warren, enabled the BBC to break down the results by council area - a more detailed level than is usually available. You can see the results for your council area on the BBC website here.
This capability is achieved through the use of a statistical procedure called "multilevel regression and post-stratification" (or MRP).
The technique produces estimates for small areas based on a limited amount of data. It uses the people from each local authority to predict that area's results, but to ensure that this small amount of data is representative of the wider population the estimates are balanced out using comparable data from the poll from the rest of the country and the census on the demographic make-up of the local authority in question. You can find out more about how MRP works here.