Survey: Church and Army, still in ranking top of institutions in which Romanians have confidence

The Church and the Army are still in the ranking of institutions in which Romanians have the most confidence, along with the Police and the Romanian Academy, according to the survey carried out by the the Analysis of Information War and Strategic Communication (LARICS), in partnership with the State Secretariat for Cults and with the "Ion I. C. Bratianu" Institute of Political Sciences and International Affairs (ISPRI)."The result of our measurement is not very different from last year - this matter is very good, because we are talking about a phenomenon that has a certain stability over time, it is not a phenomenon that changes depending on what we see on TV, depending on what is happening every month, etc. We are starting to identify some attitudinal structures with a certain stability," said researcher with the ISPRI and Vice-dean of the School of Sociology and Social Work of the University of Bucharest Darie Cristea, who presented the results of the survey at the Romanian Academy, within the 3rd edition of the "Barometer of Religious Life."According to the data, 66.3pct of Romanians have a lot or very much confidence in the Church, 61.4pct in the Army, 60.2pct in the Romanian Academy, 48.3pct in the Police, and 43.3pct in the City Hall of the locality where they live.According to the survey, people have the least confidence in the political parties, Parliament, the Government and the Presidency.The relations between the various religions and confessions in our country are regarded by Romanians as good (63.4pct) or very good (15.1pct)."It is a package of indicators that measure different aspects of religiosity - we tried measuring religiosity with 4-5 indicators to get a much better and more particular picture of this phenomenon - 54pct of the public in Romania consider themselves a 'surely yes' religious person, and 28pct 'rather yes', so, practically, religiosity is admitted by 82pct of the public in Romania," Darie Cristea stated.He mentioned that there is a difference between those who consider themselves religious and those who say that, for example, they believe in God, because there are more people who believe in God than those who consider themselves religious.From the total of those who said that they "do not really consider themselves/are not really" religious people, the overwhelming majority - 92.3pct said that they are rather indifferent towards religion and only 7.1pct responded that they are rather against religion.According to the survey, regardless of their denomination or religion, 91.6pct of the respondents said that they believe in God.Ask how important religion is to the respondents, on a scale from 1 to 10 - where 1 means not important at all and 10 means extremely important, 46.7pct of Romanians found themselves at 10, 11.6pct responded with 9, 15.6pct with 8, while 2.8pct responded with 1.The opinion survey data was collected between 27 November and 9 December 2022.The volume of the sample was 1,000 people and is representative of the non-institutionalized population of Romania, aged 18 and over.The data's maximum margin of error is +/- 3.1pct, at a confidence level of 95pct. The method used was the opinion poll based on a telephone questionnaire. The questionnaires were applied in all the counties of Romania and in the districts of Bucharest.The sample was validated based on the official data of the National Institute of Statistics (INS).