The Orange Order in Northern Ireland - Survey and interviews

McAuley, James White and Tonge, Jonathan (2016). The Orange Order in Northern Ireland - Survey and interviews. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852286

The Orange Order remains one of the largest and most significant organisations within civil society in Northern Ireland. Although in numerical decline, it nonetheless, retains a membership of up to 60,000, representing up to one-in-five of the adult male Protestant population in Northern Ireland.
Opposed to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Order has been seen by critics within unionist politics as a barrier to the modernisation of unionism and movement towards more secular Northern Ireland. For its part, the Orange Order claims a moral and political rationale to opposition to the Good Friday Agreement. Despite its prominent position, there is no definitive information on what Orange Order members think of contemporary issues. This research aims to rectify that information deficit and to address the information gap concerning the political attitudes, roles and influence of the membership of the Orange Order.

Drawing upon a large membership survey of the Orange institution, and abetted by in-depth semi-structured interviews, the research examines core political and social attitudes of Orange Order members, including the political and moral bases of opposition to, or support for, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The project will also examine the perceptions of the Order’s role as a large and significant religious-political organisation in an increasingly secular society.

Data description (abstract)

The overarching aim of the research project was to provide the first ever dataset on Orange Order members in Northern Ireland, detailing their social composition and political an social attitudes. The project deployed quantitative research, primarily involving a questionnaire survey (101 questions) of Orange Order members from 90 private lodges across Northern Ireland, weighted according to district geographical strength, eliciting nearly 1,400 replies and permitting the construction of an ESRC dataset (SPSS) of responses. The project also used qualitative research, which, following a review of the existing literature on the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, involved 129 semi-structured interviews with existing members of the Orange Order, at all levels of the organisation, plus six focus group discussions, each of 8-12 members, and 40 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have left the Orange Order since 1998.

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