Comments on: New Survey: Mormon Culture and Belief

By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:43:55 +0000

The question regarding Heavenly Mother’s equality was difficult to answer. Does the question mean (as I took it to mean) equal in value, or does it mean equal in function. While one might value Heavenly Mother and be comforted by her existance, that doesn’t mean one might feel it apporopriate to pray to her.

By: Fish

Fish — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:48:03 +0000

I think this survey is too badly worded to measure what it intends to measure. I appreciate the effort, though.

By: Matt W.

Matt W. — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:44:49 +0000

AlainB- my biggest regret is not including more demographic questions. Good Call, as it is, I think I have a pretty good basis, and since I am using multiple channels to promote the survey, I hope I am getting past the new savvy only problem. I am attempting to track for that, but we’ll see how it turns out in the results

Nathan, You You, and Mike- yep. Nothing I can do about it now. Once you release a survey, you can’t “rewrite”. It would ruin the survey results.

I will call out in the results where there were concerns with certain responses.

Jacob J- Yeah, this survey has definitely gotten a lot of “non-NCT” attention. We’ve kind of made a fun social media experiment out of it, between the blog, email, twitter, and facebook.

By: Jacob J

Jacob J — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:28:18 +0000

Matt, Apparently you are getting a lot of non-NCT readers taking the survey because none of them saw your first post asking for help on the wording of the questions.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:22:10 +0000

I understand this is a survey, but I would really like to have given written response to half of the questions. I didn’t respond to a 1/4 of them as I couldn’t tell if you were fishing for an understanding of complex doctrine or if the questions were just poorly written.

By: AlainB

AlainB — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:17:11 +0000

As someone coming from a market research background, I commend you for the effort but it seems the greatest fear I have is how the results will be interpreted. It’s absolutely normal to confront survey participants with questions that force them to make tough choices and also that allow for comparisons between answers. This allows for correlation and identifying variances in stated beliefs vs. actual beliefs. However, I think my sensitivity is that the more obscure doctrines require qualification when an answer is made.

For instance, “There is no contradiction between the theory of evolution and my religious beliefs.” Are we strictly talking about THE theory as defined by Darwin, Mendel and expanded by others which includes statements that man and primates have a common ancestor (that man literally evolved from a primate) or are we talking about evolution as a biological concept and principle of nature?

Or, “People who are excommunicated from the church are doomed to outer darkness?” Depends on how they respond to the excommunication and how they lead their life afterward. Hard to answer that with your Likert scale.

48 – as someone else stated – what? I know exactly what you’re trying to ferret out, but this question could have been worded differently to improve usefulness of the response.

49 – are we saying just baptized or are we including all of the ordinances of salvation? If you meant all of them, then you should have said that.

42 – when, in this lifetime or after Christ returns?

36 – “God lives outside of time” – our time as we who live here on Earth consider it or time in general?

So while you’ll get data out of this on the challenging doctrinal issues, I question the usefulness of it for drawing conclusions other than that many members aren’t familiar with the doctrinal questions at issue and even then you won’t know because many answered neutral because they didn’t know what else to answer.

As for the other questions, they will be useful in understanding how a certain segment of the demographics you’ve attracted feel about their faith, responsibilities and church attendance. But if you wanted useful conclusions other than a bunch of members who are net savvy believe X then you should have included more demographic questions.

By: you you

you you — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:25:15 +0000

Please consider rewriting some of your confusing questions. Neutral was a favorite answer on those. In my opinion, my answers are not 100% accurate due to the confusing wording in some questions. Wording matters immensely when it comes to religious beliefs!

By: Nathan Sorenson

Nathan Sorenson — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:08:08 +0000

Q48 is not understandable; Q49: “all” or “some”?; Q50: by whom – God or members?; Q57:”the”, as a definitive article, means “all” but you don’t mean that. Wow! My silence on the rest must mean you did well. Thank you for your time, energy and creativity. I’m looking forward to the results.

By: Ben Pratt

Ben Pratt — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:01:39 +0000

Done. Good stuff. I was also hesitant on some of the cosmological questions, mostly because my views are in flux.

By: Clean Cut

Clean Cut — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:07:06 +0000

Whoops–I see Clark asked essentially the same thing. I stopped reading after comment #44.