Kent County Congregations Study
A cooperative, community-based study of educational and social service provision by religious congregations in Kent County, Michigan
GIS: Mapping Kent County
One of our talented employees, Nathan Mosurinjohn, comments on the GIS niche he specializes in at the CSR:
“GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems, which is used to both analyze spatial data and to create maps. The GIS program we use at the CSR is fully customizable, so the possibilities for its use are endless. Some examples of ways this technology can be used include anything from site selection for business branches to hydrological studies to 3D fly-throughs of mountain ranges.
One of the main ways we are using GIS this summer is to coordinate our canvassing efforts for the Kent County Congregations Study. In addition to making an atlas of maps that the canvassers use for navigating, we have used GIS to estimate the time it will take to canvass each area and the amount of milage each area contains. We have also created a randomized set of points throughout the county to measure some of the general social and physical characteristics of the areas we are canvassing.
Once a team returns from a canvassing trip with their collected data, we use GIS to analyze what we have learned. With this technology we can chart where congregations are moving, where new congregations are forming, and where they are shutting down. We can also begin to see what the location of congregations means; for example, demographic changes in the city may be reflected in church movement and attendance. Movement of congregations can also affect how well services for young people are distributed among at-risk youth, a topic that our corresponding Youth Services Landscape Survey explores in more depth.
These are just a few of the ways that we are using GIS to aid in the implementation of our research endeavors, but as you can see, it is also a very transferable tool that can be used for a variety of purposes.”
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More about KCCS canvassing
KCCS is on Calvin’s home page today, thanks to Allison Graff—have a look.
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Kent County Congregation Study—Part de deux!
Monday we sent our first official team of Research Assistants out into the world to canvas Kent County for old, new, and re-located congregations! Our student researchers are busily scouring the county as part of an extension of the Kent County Congregational Study. The Douglas and Maria DeVos Foundation is sponsoring a continuation of the study to advance the understanding of religious congregations' role in the provision of social services, especially for youth and children. Researchers will be looking to confirm the presence of 720 congregations found in Kent County as of 2007. Data gathered from this census will allow us to monitor trends in the population of congregations and ensure that surveys and other studies are representative of the Kent county. Keep your eye out for our student researchers in your neighborhood!
Click "read more..." to read from the perspective of a canvasser...
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“Clergy Participation in Local Politics” paper and presentation
Following up on the Gatherings of Hope report for a general public readership, CSR and our research partners are beginning to produce academic studies from the 2007 Kent County Congregations Study. CSR Director Jim Penning will present our paper on "Clergy Participation in Local Politics" at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; the presentation is part of a panel on clergy activism that will take place at 8:00AM on Friday, April 3.
Key findings from the paper: Kent County clergy are quite active in contacting public officials; about 60 percent of the 496 ordained clergy in the study data said they had contacted a public official about an issue of interest to their congregation. Like other citizens, members of the clergy are strongly influenced by their educational level; those with Master's and doctoral-level education were 22 to 24 percent more likely to contact public officials than those with less than college education; those with Bachelor's-level education were 8 percent more likely.
Congregational context is also important; for example, clergy from congregations with large percentages of high-income persons were dramatically less likely to contact public officials, probably because they do not perceive serious needs to do so; the percentage of theologically liberal participants in the congregation was also an important influence. Clergy serving congregations that experienced internal conflict in the last two years were actually more likely to contact public officials. The paper also models which kinds of officials were contacted (city, state and federal, for example) and what issues the contacts were about. Education was the most frequently cited cause for contacting officials, with much higher levels of contact by clergy from congregations with Black and Hispanic pluralities and near schools with high proportions of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
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Visualizing vision statements
Happy 2009 from CSR!
An online tool called Wordle is all the rage; we found it after FlowingData gave Wordle honorable mention in its 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year. We couldn't resist feeding the 55 of the "most quotable" vision statements from respondents to the Kent County Congregations Study into Wordle. Here's the result:
Click the image to see a larger version on Wordle.
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