On the June 23rd in a special leadership broadcast, Elder L. Tom Perry announced that the Church would be rolling out a program to allow its full-time missionaries to use Facebook and other new media platforms to connect with investigators and potential converts. This change is part of a broader trend toward more online engagement by the Church.
The Internet occupies an important place within the unfolding history of religion. The Internet is a powerful tool that presents many challenges and opportunities within religious communities. In recent General Conference addresses, high-ranking Church leaders have encouraged members to be actively engaged in online communities.
A new internet survey examining how Mormons use the Internet aims to explore how Mormons engage with online communities. This survey fills a gap in the existing literature within the Study of Media and Religion. The field of Media and Religion is growing quickly and is in desperate need of quality research about Mormonism. The literature that does exist is outdated and only anecdotal. Existing studies do not capture the complexity of Mormon life or community on the internet. The unique place of Mormonism and the positive interaction with technology has the potential to expand the discussion within academic circles, creating a constructive conversation. This survey and subsequent studies will help situate Mormonism and Mormons’ experiences in this important moment in history.
To take the survey click on this link.
The survey was constructed to use questions from existing studies, such as research from the Pew Center. This design enables the researchers to to compare and contrast the findings of this survey with previous studies, creating a more robust analysis.
Many of the questions in this survey necessarily simplify complex religious and spiritual issues. Close-ended questions are difficult to craft and are necessarily blunt instruments. This is a huge limitation of all survey research, but it is unfortunately unavoidable. Please try to identify the answer that best reflects your opinion even if the choices presented don’t exactly match your views.
When participating in the portion of the study directly related to internet usage, if the sites you visit are not listed, please take the few second to fill in the ‘other’ box. Your feedback in these boxes will improve this survey, and provide vital information for future survey construction. Despite the limitations of this survey, it does provide a snapshot of Mormon Internet usage and the more participants the clearer the picture.
The survey has ethics approval from the University of Cambridge and the results of this study will be shared with general and academic audiences. In addition to the general presentation of the results, participants who are interested in a report of the results of the survey will be sent a copy.
About the principle investigators of the study: Brad Jones is a Doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Jessica Finnigan is an Advanced Diploma student in Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Jessica Finnigan
Jessica is a Master's Student at King's College London, where she studies religion in the contemporary world. She recently completed an advanced Diploma in Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge. She earned a Bachelors from BYU in Marriage, Family, and Human Development. She is married to her best friend, and they have 4 daughters.
All posts by Jessica Finnigan
Jessica,
A Facebook friend of mine suggested I take the survey, and I did. And I have a concern. Perhaps you can address it.
You write:
My concern is that this survey doesn’t even begin to address the “complexity of Mormon life or community on the Internet.” The survey’s pre-loaded answers suggest blogs, podcasts, and Facebook pages favored by people at the intellectual, cultural, and belief fringes of the Church.
The vast majority of Latter-day Saints — including the millions who live outside the U.S. — are unlikely to even be aware of Mormon Stories, Zelophehad’s Daughters, or Feminist Mormon Housewives. How does this survey “capture the complexity” of their Internet experience?
And I — one who does happen to be aware of these sites — don’t really follow their “faithful dissent” line of thinking. I enjoy scholarship and rational faith, but I’m not a fan of what I see as the constant carping and criticism of the Church and its leadership that come from these sites. So when I took the survey, I found myself checking “none of the above” or filling in the sites I do tend to spend my time with.
So my fear is that this survey is going to get a lot of attention among the tiny minority of the Bloggernacle who listen to Mormon Stories, and that the results will reflect that minority, but certainly not “the complexity of Mormon life or community on the internet.”
Can you address the issues of sampling and how conclusions will be drawn?
Thanks,
Mike
Mike- that is all stuff we will account for in the analysis. The issue with most of church stuff is that it is highly weighed towards the US. Even with official church stuff living in the UK makes my ward very cut off. This is something that is larger than the survey, but hopefully we can show.
This is not a critique of the church in anyway. It is the first attempt to capture the way mormons are using the internet. And when sites are not listed we did ask that they be filled in. This is not a survey that is looking at all of the members of the church and how they use the internet, that would require the cooperation of the church and even BYU professors cannot get that data.
I do think that it will show how the blogs are connected by readership, who connects to what blogs, where people are taking the survey from will be important data. The internet and religion is a very new field and the generalizability is always limited. I am not sure if I answered your questions. The questions you raise would be the result of poor scholarship and over generalizations. The follow up surveys will also be used to capture the nuance.
This is scheduled to also post on more conservative mainstream blogs. And again we asked that participants fill in the blogs that are not listed.
Jessica,
Thank you for responding to my concerns. I look forward to reading the results of the survey.
Mike