Blog
July 7, 2026
The weeks following the public release of Phase 2 have taken Footprints findings into two academic settings: the annual conference of the European Academy of Religion (EuARE), held in Rome in early July, and a research workshop on public opinion and civic engagement at the University of Navarra.
A European panel at EuARE 2026
On 1 July, the EuARE annual conference hosted the panel Work, Beliefs and Civic Engagement Among Young People, which brought together the project’s General Coordinator and partners from three of the European countries in the study.
José María Díaz-Dorronsoro (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross), General Coordinator of Footprints, opened the panel with a global reading of Phase 2 (Work, Meaning and Belief), based on 9,018 interviews conducted in nine countries in early 2026. His presentation questioned what he described as a quiet methodological ethnocentrism: much of what is assumed about young people, work and religion rests on single-country studies of Western, often adult, populations. Seen across nine societies, the picture is less uniform. Two-thirds of young people globally identify as believers, but belief in God ranges from 38% in Italy to 90% in Kenya — a spread that is itself a finding. On work, the data show a generation that needs a salary but attaches conditions to it: nearly half would leave a stable, well-paid job over a toxic working environment. Belief is associated with a clearer sense of professional calling and, most consistently, with higher civic and voluntary engagement — including service beyond believers’ own communities. He was careful to note what the data cannot yet say: these are cross-sectional associations, not causal claims, and disentangling them is precisely what the longitudinal design exists to do.
Karen Sanders, Head of the School of Business and Law at St Mary’s University (UK), presented Faith, Meaning and Work, an analysis of the British sample. Testing the expectation that work among young adults in a secularised society would be emptied of religious meaning, she found the UK data pointing elsewhere: religious belief and practice among 18–29-year-olds are widespread rather than residual, and religiosity — measured through belief, prayer and attendance — is consistently associated with framing work as spiritually meaningful, as service to others, and as a source of identity. Prayer frequency also tracks civic behaviour: those who pray daily are several times more likely to do regular community or social-service work than those who rarely pray. Her presentation closed with the limitations stated plainly — descriptive findings, an online sample that may skew towards the more religiously engaged — and a measured conclusion: for young British adults who pray, the workplace has not been emptied of the sacred.
Charo Sádaba (University of Navarra), Footprints partner for Spain, presented the Spanish case, situating young Spaniards’ relationship to work, meaning and belief within the comparative frame of the nine-country study — a profile that, alongside Italy and the UK, illustrates the more secular and more guarded European corner of the global map.
Isabella Cordisco (Salesian Pontifical University), partner for the Italian case, offered a relational reading of the Italian data under the title Lives on Hold? Italy, she argued, is not a case of low meaning but of meaningful aspiration under weak confidence: young Italians invest work with expectations of passion, fulfilment and life compatibility, yet report the lowest belief in God in the sample (38%), very low optimism about future job opportunities (32%, against 60% globally) and a weak sense of clear professional calling. Her analysis traced this gap through four relational circles — who shapes the idea of work, who supports in difficulty, what makes work liveable, and how work connects to civic life — concluding that the decisive question for Italy is not only employability, but whether relational, educational, spiritual and civic mediations can sustain the aspirations young people bring to work.
Religiosity and civic engagement: a two-wave analysis presented in Pamplona
Earlier in the summer, on 18–19 June, Norberto González Gaitano — who initiated and led the first phase of the Footprints project — took part in the workshop Public Opinion and Democratic Civic Engagement: Expanding Reflection in Public Agendas, organised in Pamplona by the School of Communication and the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Navarra. The workshop, held in tribute to Maxwell McCombs and Esteban López-Escobar and their contribution to agenda-setting research, gathered scholars in communication, sociology and politics around the current challenges of public opinion studies, with keynote lectures by Patricia Moy (University of Washington) and Thomas Petersen (Allensbach Institute), among others.
There, González Gaitano presented a paper co-authored with José María Díaz-Dorronsoro: Does Religious Engagement Foster Civic Engagement Among Young People? Highlights from the Footprints International Surveys. The paper draws on both waves of Footprints data (2023, N = 4,889, eight countries; 2026, N = 9,018, nine countries) and measures religiosity along three dimensions: identity (belief in God), practice (prayer and attendance) and intensity (importance of faith). In Wave 2, believers score higher than non-believers on every civic dimension studied, with the largest gaps in volunteering — both faith-based and, notably, non-confessional. Regression models with country fixed effects and sociodemographic controls reveal a double pattern: religious practice, rather than identity alone, predicts general civic engagement, while for volunteering the simple conviction of believing retains an independent effect. The authors read this cautiously: in contexts of high youth religiosity, religious communities appear to operate as a relevant resource for civic participation — an association whose direction the coming waves of the study will help clarify. A version of this research will be presented at the WAPOR annual conference in Mexico City this October.