The best way to answer this question, we decided, was to make a survey! For more than 4 months, we pushed a survey out to everybody we could reach. Baristas, hair dressers, friends, Facebook, Twitter, everybody who was willing to take a go. We also sent it out into all of the churches in Diocese (Episcopal Diocese of Western Washington), asking parish members to take it themselves and pass it along to those who don't attend church. We went both by the internet and by postcard, so that nobody was left out.
The survey had two questions, 1: Do you regularly attend church?
This was left intentionally vague, church meant to mean any church, not just Episcopal.
Question 2: What 6 words come to mind when you hear the word 'church'?
This was the meat of the survey. How do people see church?
With the two different groups answering, we could clearly see the differences between the groups. In total we got 1287 responses. Of that, 295 answered no to the first question, and 992 answered yes. While we would have liked to get more responses, we were satisfied with what we got.
Below, you can see our results. I have made two Google Docs, viewable by the world, with the collected responses. Their links are below.
Responses from People Who Do Not Regularly Attend Church
Responses from People Who Do Regularly Attend Church
However, since reading the responses isn't very interesting we created Wordles (word clouds, read more here) to graphically display the results. You can view those with the links below.
You can also read the blog posts about the Survey Data Collection and results here: "Is Church Boring?", "Manna In These Wordles", "So What Do People Think of Church?"
If you have any comments or questions please post it here :) We'd love to continue this conversation with you!
Regular Attendee Wordle
Non-Regular Attendee Wordle
However, since reading the responses isn't very interesting we created Wordles (word clouds, read more here) to graphically display the results. You can view those with the links below.
You can also read the blog posts about the Survey Data Collection and results here: "Is Church Boring?", "Manna In These Wordles", "So What Do People Think of Church?"
If you have any comments or questions please post it here :) We'd love to continue this conversation with you!
Regular Attendee Wordle
Non-Regular Attendee Wordle
Thanks for posting the data! I've tried to clean it up a little so it's a usable data set, removing prepositions, parenthetical remarks, etc., and am starting to play around with the data.
ReplyDeleteHere's a graph showing connections between words that appear 5 or more times in the unchurched corpus: http://euouae.org/ocw/2013-07-14.1/unchurched.png
A connection between two words indicates that they appeared together in the same submission. There's no attempt to more tightly link words which appear together more often, or to otherwise weight the data. There is some loose clustering, which is visually-apparent, e.g. the middle right clump of brainwashing, guilt, hypocritical, judgmental, money, lies and cult. (Or perhaps more hopefully but less concretely, the link between "love" and "music".)
I'm hoping to dig a little deeper into the data and produce something more meaningful, but I think it's interesting to wander around the links in this one, and in particular to look at the rough groupings, although not too much should be read into the groupings in this. I'm hoping to extract some cleaner clustering, and visualize that.
Juli- Thanks for pushing deeper in this! It's very interesting to see all the connections between words and wonderful just to have another person to talk through the data with. I'll forward on your comment above to the rest of the team to make sure they see it :-)
ReplyDeleteRobert