Chris Udy writes: > My read is that 27,000 people - all UCA members? - responded to the RA > survey. 88% of them used the survey to register a protest. 273,000 UCA > members (at least) did not choose the survey as the way to > discern the Holy > Spirit's guidance for the Church - one way or the other.
Indeed. I wrote to the Alliance telling them why I wasn't going to complete the survey and pointing out the design flaws. I got a long letter back thanking me for taking the trouble to write and responding to my critique (in part) by agreeing that there were indeed significant design flaws. The writer seemed to be experiencing significant difficulty because his research training made him very aware of the problems (it was clear that he hadn't seen the survey until it was being distributed) and yet believed very strongly that proposal 84 was wrong and that surveying the UCA was a good step. It is constantly sad that the few rabid enthusiasts can make anyone associated with them look foolish! You would have hoped, however, that the Age would have done their research a little more carefully and realised that the only reasonable claim they could have made was that 88% of respondents believed.... The NCLS survey had a better chance of being a representative sample than the Alliance one, but it was a very small one, so I'm not sure that it was much more reliable. I think that the only way we might get a fairly accurate understanding of the beliefs/feelings of UCA members would be to convince the government to include the question in the next census (as if!) :-) On another tack: Tom suggested that people who signed as "Dr" should be very embarrassed. I suspect that a significant number of the Drs have medical qualifications, which tend not to include courses on research methodology, and it is definitely possible to get PhDs without doing this - the majority of theological PhDs would not involve any research that requires an understanding of statistics, for example, and nor would history PhDs or a number of others I'm too tired to bother thinking about just at the moment. I suspect that many of the Drs are simply people of goodwill who don't have any more training than many others which would enable them to see the flaws in the survey design. One of the things that continues to sadden me about this debate is that many of the people on 'the other side' are those who pre-Assembly were if not my friends, then at least colleagues with whom I could work well and in harmony. And some of them have no idea how hurtful their rhetoric actually is because they are talking about 'them out there' with no thought that some of us here will take it personally because we hear them talking about theologies and stances with which we happen to agree (and that applies to people on both sides) in ways that demonise the holders of the positions rather than simply taking issue with the positions themselves. And I wasn't going to get started on this again.... Judy -- The church is something like a swimming pool...most of the noise comes from the shallow end. paraphrase of Prof Sarah Coakley, Harvard University Judy Redman [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
