Center for Social Research

DeVos Place Host to B2B ArtPrize Student Mural

When you’re checking out ArtPrize 2011, be sure to include a visit to “I Believe I Become,” the six piece mural created by a team of student artists from Grand Rapids Public Schools and sponsored by several local businesses and two local artists. You’ll find the mural at DeVos Place in downtown Grand Rapids. By supporting strong schools, community partnership, parent resources, and student experiences, B2B hopes to help students achieve success in school, work, and life by the year 2025. Believe 2 Become is a partnership of Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS), Grand Rapids Student Advancement Foundation, dozens of community‐based and faith‐based organizations, and the Douglas and Maria DeVos Foundation. CSR’s assistance to the project through surveys and a shared database is ongoing as the B2B continues its work in our community.

Social Sciences Lunch Seminar Series for Fall 2011

The Social Sciences Lunch Seminar Series kicks off Friday September 23 with a talk by Martin Hughes, Assistant Professor of Sociology and movie buff. Dr. Hughes will discuss "Children Are Our Future: Changing Visions of Youth in Movies about the Future, 1950-2009."

All of the 2011-12 seminars take place at Calvin College, in the Alumni Association Board Room, 12:30 p.m. with lunch tickets free and available starting at 12:15 p.m.

Please join us for this and future Seminar Series Lunches.

Sponsored by the Center for Social Research, the Dean for Social Sciences and Contextual Studies, and the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Christian Perspectives on Political, Social and Economic Thought.

Hellos and Goodbyes

A lot of new faces will be popping up at the CSR this month. Tom Sherwood, a Calvin grad who studied social work, will be taking on a leadership role as our new research associate. He’ll act as a project manager and student supervisor. We’re also welcoming Daniel Molling, a sophomore economics major; Traci Montgomery, a junior geography major; Brad Wassink, a junior political science major; and Kristen Napp, a junior social work major, as student research assistants. With these new additions, the CSR has students from nearly every social science offered by Calvin College. We’ll be a well-rounded group.

Some people are coming, and some are leaving. The CSR is bidding a fond farewell to three members of our team: Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, Debbie Velis Guzman, and Tyler Greenway. Christina, our fearless research associate, is going to grad school at University of Nevada, Las Vegas to study experimental psychology and music cognition. She is a genius, and she will succeed wherever she goes. Debbie, who was of great assistance to us in part thanks to her Spanish language abilities, will be heading back home to El Salvador for a while before she returns to the U.S. to take on a Management position at Walmart. Tyler, a three-year veteran of the CSR, will be across the street in Calvin Seminary. Each of these members of our team has been an important part of what we do. We appreciate what they’ve done, and we’ll miss them when they leave, but we wish them well in their new ventures.

Believe 2 Become Seeks to Boost Academic Achievement in Grand Rapids

Fifteen thousand children in Grand Rapids are being served by the Believe 2 Become initiative (“B2B”). The initiative focuses on four neighborhood “Hope Zones.” The Community Research Institute at Grand Valley State University is a research partner for the CSR, and they provide maps and demographic profiles of each neighborhood.

By supporting strong schools, community partnership, parent resources, and student experiences, B2B hopes to help students achieve success in school, work, and life by the year 2025. Believe 2 Become is a partnership of Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS), Grand Rapids Student Advancement Foundation, dozens of community‐based and faith‐based organizations, and the Douglas and Maria DeVos Foundation.

These groups are investing in teacher training and system support at GRPS and are sponsoring after-school study programs and a summer learning program.

B2B is also sponsoring a Neighborhood Engagement program. In this program, staff members from LINC Community Revitalization, Inc. conduct community meetings, organize community events, and go door-to-door educating parents: all with the goal of promoting knowledge of and encouraging action toward student success.

This is where the CSR comes in; among other things, we are responsible for evaluating the effectiveness of the Neighborhood Engagement work. One method we will use is a community survey, with specific focus on the four areas in inner city Grand Rapids mentioned above. With our B2B partners, the CSR has designed, tested, and assisted the fielding of the survey instrument. These parallel surveys are being implemented in two ways: face-to-face by LINC neighborhood staff, and by telephone to the entire county. LINC staff will interview up to 1,200 adults in the initiative’s neighborhoods in each year of the program for the face-to-face component. The county-wide telephone survey will provide an early baseline for the community’s attitudes toward education and for comparing the Hope Zones to the rest of the county.

With these surveys, the initiative hopes to discover whether or not B2B Neighborhood Engagement is fostering positive attitudes, knowledge, and behavior regarding the education of children. In particular, we are looking at what people believe about the educational and vocational opportunities for kids in their neighborhoods. For instance, do parents expect their children to graduate from high school? What about college? We also want to see whether or not parents adopt “vital behaviors” of the B2B initiative: expressing affirmation, encouraging school attendance, doing schoolwork, asking for help when needed, and reading at least 20 minutes daily.

In addition to surveys, the CSR has created a shared database to help LINC document the scope and impact of their work with neighborhood residents. This includes recruitment into LINC’s action planning groups, such as the group convened around increasing parental, especially male, involvement in children’s education. We are also tracking group membership sign‐ups and referrals to services such as job skill development, after-school programs, or other service referrals.

Report on 2009 Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Survey

Since 2004, CSR has been supporting the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) in its Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project, which has been funded by grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Three waves of surveys have been conducted on an approximately biennial bases, in 2004/2005 (which we're now labeling "2005" for simplicity's sake), 2007 and 2009. A full report is now available comparing all three survey waves and including statistical models of pastors' self-reported pastoral health (vocational satisfaction and sustainability), leadership skills, and congregational fulfillment of the CRC's mission statement. The report finds statistical stability across all three waves--excellence is indeed being sustained. But we also identify many areas of concern with room for improvement, especially council support through systematic feedback on preaching. The statistical models suggest that programmatic interventions per se have mixed effects, but targeting leadership skill development could stimulate improvements in pastoral health. The following resources are available from CSR; also see the SPE project's survey page. Full report (11.2MB; 78-page color PDF, with extensive bookmarks and hypertext cross-referencing) Printable PDF questionnaires for pastors and clerks of council. Online web-based questionnaires for pastors and clerks of council (shown in preview mode; data is not collected). Charts and frequencies of multiple choice items for pastors (56-page PDF) and clerks of council (26-page PDF). Comments and critiques are welcome! Click "read more" below to see a sample finding from the 2009 survey. UPDATE 12/20: The CRC Newsroom has a story about the survey. UPDATE 1/15: The Grand Rapids Press has written a story about the survey.

Here is an image of Figure 25 that appears on page 39 of the report (page 46 in the PDF count). The horizontal axis shows the pastoral health scores for 2009 respondents on a scale of 12 items related to pastoral health, such as spousal support, life balance, satisfaction with present pastorate, feelings of isolation in ministry, etc. Each blue dot is an individual pastor’s response from 2009. The pattern shows that pastors start with relatively higher health scores, experience a decline in their health scores in the 2.1 to 5.9 year stretch, after which the scores recover as tenure increases above 11 years. The difference between the 2.1 to 5.9 year dip and its immediate neighboring categories is not statistically significant, but pastors with 11 or more years of tenure in their congregation are significantly healthier than the 2.1 to 5.9 year group. The pattern likely reflects a selection effect—pastors who are relatively unhealthy in their current setting change churches or leave the ministry, leaving only those who are relatively satisfied in place.

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