National Traits and the Ecological Fallacy

This article caught my eye, headlined "Why criminals believe in heaven." [The Daily Mail's 'Science' and 'Health' pages are an unlimited resource for writing blog posts about bad statistics, but I promise to try not to only pick on them in future.]

The original paper is here (predictably the DM don't bother to link to it), and here is the university's press release which has been pretty slavishly copied to create the article.   The summary is, the researchers combined crime data from one source (the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), with survey data on people's attitudes to religion and other things (from World Values Surveys and European Value Surveys).  They found that the belief in heaven and hell is a strong predictor of crime rates at a country-wide level, whilst rates of particular religious beliefs were not.