Many Canadians prefer to pray, meditate or worship in the privacy of their own homes rather than in public, suggests a new report by Statistics Canada.

The study, based on data from 2002, found that among Canadians who said they had not attended any religious services over the previous year, 27 per cent reported worshipping at home.

Of those who said they attended religious services infrequently in the year prior to the survey, 37 per cent said they engaged in religious practices on their own on a weekly basis.

"We found that there is a large percentage of people who don't go to religious services on a regular basis, but do practice in their own home," Warren Clark of Statistics Canada told CTV News.

"That was a bit surprising to us."

Older Canadians were more likely to practice religion on their own, as were immigrants to Canada, according to the study.

Clark speculated that in the older generation, perhaps some people had reached an age when they weren't able to go to regular services, so they continued to worship at home.

"Also, it could be younger people as well, maybe they were brought up attending religious services, and maybe they slipped away over time. But they may still be continuing in the private practices," he said.

According to the study, 53 per cent of Canadians say they worship in private at least monthly. Eleven per cent did so a few times a year.

The numbers are in comparison to previous research that found about 32 per cent of adult Canadians attended religious services at least monthly.

These statistics suggest that "Canadians attach a higher degree of importance to religion than religious attendance figures alone would indicate," StatsCan says.

The study also looked at "religiosity" among Canadians, which is made up of four dimensions -- affiliation, attendance, personal practices and importance of religion.

Based on this criteria, 29 per cent of Canadians are highly religious. However, 40 per cent of Canadians have a low degree of religiosity, and 31 per cent are moderately religious.

Older age groups and women, rather than men, tended to have higher religiosity, the study says. It is also high among immigrants, mainly those from South Asia.

It is low among people who have parents with no religious affiliation.

Provincially, residents of Atlantic Canada were much more likely to be highly religious than someone from Quebec or British Columbia, said Clark. The other provinces came in somewhere in between.

The majority of the data for this study came from the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey, conducted from April to August 2002.

About 42,500 people aged 15 and over were interviewed by telephone in the 10 provinces.