Center for Social Research

New CSR Technical Assistant

As of June 2009, CSR welcomes a new technical assistant who specializes in ArcGIS, an advanced computer mapping program! To learn more about technical assistant positions, visit our employment opportunities page.

Nathan Mosurinjohn Hometown: Fort Atkinson, WI Degree: B.A. in Geography and International Development Favorite Research Software: ArcGIS

Stay tuned to see maps of Kent County!

Report on selection of majors in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)

We are releasing today our new report Cultivating STEM: Why West Michigan college students select majors in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The Van Andel Education Institute sponsored our fall 2008 survey of West Michigan college juniors at four local schools. 888 students participated. Key findings in the report include:

1. Despite a lot of talk about a shortage of qualified graduates in STEM fields, the best recent evidence is for lack of demand for graduates, not lack of supply. Survey data confirms that students are concerned about job availability and potential earnings, though these are secondary to perceived natural gifts and the opportunity to improve the lives of others. Attracting more majors to these fields will require attention to demand-side considerations like increasing employment opportunities and improving salaries for STEM workers.
2. Majors in the health professions differ markedly from the rest of students in the factors they are most likely to report as influences on their major selection. They are far more likely to cite an opportunity to improve the lives of others, as well as more likely to cite demand-side matters like job availability and potential earnings.
3. Significant numbers of students say they "seriously considered" a STEM-related major--enough to increase STEM enrollment more than 20 percent, had they been recruited. The vast majority of these students did not abandon STEM because it was uninteresting or too hard (though these are common rationales); rather, STEM simply lost the competition with other fields that were more attractive or interesting.

Click "READ MORE" below to see a sample chart, or just download the free PDF, which includes comprehensive navigation tools for online reading. To request a full-color, bound copy, please contact CSR at 616 526-7799 or csr@calvin.edu

READ MORE...

Multicultural Climate Survey drawing winners

The online phase of the Multicultural Climate Survey has been completed as of Saturday, May 9, with 2,127 responses. Here's the final response rate chart:

We are now moving toward collecting paper responses from staff members who do not have regular access to email. Final results of the survey will be shared with the Calvin community in the fall.

Of 50 winners of $20 gift certificates to the Campus Store; only 18 responded to the survey and received their certificate, though. Here are the winners:

Faculty	Staff	Students
Margaret Goetz Delvin Ratzsch Jolene Vos-Camy	Heidi Rienstra Nancy Westra	Monica Bressler Nathan Elzinga Emily Howell Nicholas Kramer Jessica Leugs Holland Mayer Hope McElroy Kathleen Merz Rachel Mudde Rebecca Timmermans Eric Van Giessen Laura Weglarz Melissa Winegar

Five winners also enjoyed a lunch with President Byker at the Manor House on Thursday, May 7. The winners were:

Megan Marie, faculty
Jun Yeb Kim, student
Caleb Kuntz, student
Rachael Mutschler, student
Andrea Sizemore, student

Thanks to all the respondents for your time and attention!

“Responding to Neighborhood Change: CRC Congregations in Southeast Grand Rapids, 1970-2000”

How do congregations from a white ethnic denomination respond to growing urban diversity? Sociology professors Dr. Mark Mulder, Calvin College, and Dr. Kevin Dougherty, Baylor University, examined 30 years worth of change (1970-2000) in 14 Christian Reformed congregations in Southeast Grand Rapids, Michigan. They tracked neighborhood composition, residential patterns of congregation members, and congregation membership totals. As white residents declined in urban neighborhoods, congregations from this historically Dutch denomination had difficulty sustaining themselves as neighborhood churches.

CSR and Calvin’s Dept. of Sociology and Social Work will co-sponsor a talk by Drs. Mulder and Dougherty, in which they will discuss how congregations respond to neighborhood change.

Thursday April 23, 2009
7:00 p.m.
Calvin College Meeter Center Lecture Hall

The image below shows the increasing radius of members’ residences at one congregation: 

         

“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.