Hi Judy, I understood your point about those who put their name to the survey. I agree with you that there could well have been some naivety there, though saying might open you, and me in agreeing with you, to a charge of being paternalistic.
Tom > > Judy: 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!) :-) > > Ann: Perhaps someone from NCLS can enlighten us on their sampling process > and whether they think their sample size is large enough to draw some > conclusions. At least the NCLS sample is randomised across the > UCA (that is, > there is no reason to believe that people responding to the > survey are more > likely to have one view or another about sexuality). Judy: I am not sure that the randomising is quite as effective as one might hope. Each person who did the NCLS survey was handed a sheet which had a (large) number of core questions that appeared on every sheet and a (smaller) number of questions that only appeared on a proportion of the sheets. This was done so that a wide range of questions were asked without everyone being asked to complete a survey form that was bigger than the Sydney phone book. My observation of the left-overs after we'd distributed them to all our congregations was that some of the non-core questions were considered more important than others and so appeared more frequently. That is, if there were say, six sets of non-core questions A, B, C, D, E & F, in every ten sheets sent to congregations, there were five sheets with set A and one each of sets B-F. From the sample size, I imagine that the question about gay & lesbian ordination was in one of the less frequently distributed sets of non-core questions. If the sets of sheets were distributed by one person in each congregation, then the distribution would have been randomised, but there is still the chance that if only 9 people completed the survey, no-one in that particular congregation would have answered that question and my experience is that smaller congregations are likely to be more conservative. If, however, more than one person distributed questionnaires or sets were passed up each side of the aisle, it would be possible for a congregation of 18 to have the surveys distributed in such a way that no-one got that particular set. Obviously the randomisation would be more successful the larger the congregation, but it is possible that the figures are somewhat biased (because I can't spell the word I wanted to use) towards a less conservative perspective on this issue. This is quite apart from my uneasiness about trying to use such a small percentage of the total sample size to do anything more than indicate a trend that is worth investigating further (or not). I am sure that the NCLS did the stats to ensure that sufficient copies of each set of questions were handed out so that answering them was not a waste of time and money and there is clearly far more methodological integrity in the NCLS survey than the Alliance survey, but I would not be willing to stake anything I held dear on the NCLS results. And I agree with Ann - the Alliance survey certainly wouldn't have got through either of the research ethics committees I've belonged to. The point I think I was trying to make is that I think that *most* of the people who signed the ads trusted a small group of people to design the questionnaire on their behalf and that most of them don't necessarily have the expertise to analyse the research design anyway, which makes them naive and unwise accessories to a piece of research that wouldn't meet research ethics guidelines. I would like to allow them room to manouvre so that there is the possibility of their admitting their mistakes in a reasonably face-saving way and bridges might be built, rather than forcing them into a corner where they feel they have no alternative than to come out fighting. They are also, apparently, fairly clueless about privacy legislation - when I visited their website, there was a complaint that the Assembly had not been willing to help them distribute the surveys even by providing them with a mailing list! Privacy legislation makes it quite clear that it is an offence to provide lists of identifying information (such as names and addresses) to any third party without the specific permission of the people whose information is being provided unless it was made clear when the info was collected that it was going to be used in this way. When I emailed the person who maintains the site and explained this to him, his response was basically 'thank you for sharing that with me', but again, I am not convinced that most of those who signed the ad are like this. Many of the ones I know personally certainly have not struck me as such in the past. Judy -- "Politics is the work we do to keep the world safe for our spirituality" - Judith Plaskow Rev Judy Redman Uniting Church Chaplain University of New England Armidale 2351 ph: +61 2 6773 3739 fax: +61 2 6773 3749 web: http://www.une.edu.au/campus/chaplaincy/uniting/ action for peace: http://www.une.edu.au/campus/chaplaincy/uniting/links/peace.html email: [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 ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ - 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 ------------------------------------------------------
