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This paper describes an attempt to construct a typology of progressive Catholics using data obtained from a survey of the delegates to the 1980 National Pastoral Congress of English Catholics eighteen months after the Congress. Progressivism is regarded as the espousal of the new elements of religious ideology and pastoral emphases which have emerged since the Second Vatican Council.
Following earlier attempts using smallest space analysis and factor analysis, this paper describes the use of cluster analysis to identify distinct groups of individuals and discriminant analysis to identify the separate dimensions which distinguish between the clusters. Seven dusters ware identified in terms of six discriminant functions. An analysis of the social and religious characteristics of the seven types indicated that there was no simple unidimensional scale of progressivism. The paper concludes with some suggestions for a more comprehensive classification of progressive Catholics which might be explored in the case of other or more representative samples.
This paper set out to construct a typology of progressive Catholics using data from a survey of delegates to the National Pastoral Congress. Following preliminary investigations using smallest space analysis and factor analysis, cluster analysis was employed to identify seven types of respondents with characteristics defined by six discriminant functions which were found to be theoretically meaningful. The social and religious characteristics of the seven dusters indicate that they may be regarded as seven distinct types of progressive. The typology that resulted from this study (Table 3) indicates that only seven of a possible 64 combinations are relevant for this particular sample. There is no reason to suppose that this would be the case for other samples, such as a nationally representative sample of English or American or Australian Catholics. However, on the basis of the present research, a number of key... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]