As you may know if you've been following along, I am helping to do market and subject matter research prior to writing a book that will serve as a simple but comprehensive overview of the "typical" experiences of Exmormons in Transition to expect.

It will also spend a good deal of space covering Exmormons' largest challenges on their way out and providing researched, recommended solutions.

This summer we sent out this survey and 530 people from this and other sites in the exmormon community responded. What we have now (see attached pdf report) is a summary of their answers to these questions about exmormons:


1) Sexual Orientation
2) Level of Education
3) How long ago their disaffection began
4) Age at the time of disaffection
5) Geographic locations
6) Typical experiences in transition
7) Current "stage" in the transition out
8) Activity level of significant relationships
9) The most difficult challenges during your transition


Check out the findings for yourself! http://www.exmormonrecoverybook.com/wp-content/uploads/Exmormon-Survey-Results.pdf

It may or may not be of interest to you, but for the writers of this book and I believe for others with an interest in the Exmormon Community in general, it provides a wealth of information about WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE'RE GOING THROUGH.

As always, I'd appreciate discussion and feedback on the survey, the results and how they are presented, and on any of the 9 topics.


So what's next?


Next step in the Book Project is to do the remainder of the research needed before we can start on the book, including:

- Psychographic Model of the "typical" exmormon (with some help from social scientists among us)

- SWOT Analysis of the Exmormon Community

- Clarify the book's readers and assumptions (like whether to call the church a cult or not as the Mormon Stories crowd is different from, say, the RfM crowd.

- Researching Solutions to Top Exmormon Challenges from existing books and literature (see #9 results--this was HUGE)

I'd like to have done all this by now but will attribute the delay to periods of anxiety/depression as well as my still-growing project management skills.

So I'm thinking now I'll regroup with our project team and the Exmormon Foundation about doing the rest of the research in an organized fashion, and podcasting what we find along the way might be the best way to share & discuss findings so this is truly a community endeavor.

I wasn't surprised by any of it but still find it fascinating.

Thanks for posting the results.

It was nice to see the results. Very interesting.

The thing I found most interesting is the educational level of the ex-mos in your survey. A whopping 96.4% have more than a high school education. Very significant IMO.

Sorry I missed the poll, but I woulda fit right in there with the norm. Anyway, just a suggestion. You need more numbers. 500 samples is not a very large number and you need at least 1000 to have a quasi acceptable sample for your study to have some validity.
It was interesting to see very few exmo's were excommunicated - most chose to leave. That pretty much disproves the church's supposition that we are a bunch of ner-do-well's.

500 sample population is ok:

- if population is around 500, 50% of the population should be sampled.
- if population is around 1500, 20% of the population should be sampled.
- if population is above 5000, same size of 400 people would be enough.

the population on these forums seems larger than 5000, 500 people sampled is ok. it's representative enough.

ref: Gay, L.R (1996). Educational research: Competencies for Analysis and Application (5th. ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Mrril/Prentice Hall. [see page 125.]

--
interesting to note that on question#3 around 16% responded between 2-3 years and also between 6-10 years. i wonder the reason for the gap/double-up wave.

About Question #3, I made age groups what they are but I also have a list breaking it down year by year.

A few academic researchers/stats people helping out figured a few hundred responses would be good enough. I was really surprised to get 300 in a few days and ultimately 530.

I don't intend for this to be published according to scholarly standards, unless someone besides myself could take the spreadsheets of answers we have and do something with that. I hope the things we find out during this project the whole community can benefit from, so I'll announce the summary and if anyone wants to be more involved, let me know.

For the purpose of the book, I feel like the answers we have are enough to guide our efforts from now on to research and write the book with a clearer, deeper picture of the reader in mind.

I think the book will refer to what people said in the survey including quotes and excerpts from exit stories, but not claim our interpretation of the survey data is gospel, just reporting what a lot of people said and making our best guesses.

ah cool. thnx for clarifying question #3.

keep us posted on the book. insights, questions, feedback, whatever. we can help.

it's really really interesting.

Oh I thought the study was for all exmormons, not just the ones here.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2012 03:05PM by Susan I/S.

Great stuff! I hope to see the book soon.

Some suggestions from an analysis perspective:

1. Separate data by BIC/baptism age status. Especially useful for the timeline question.

2. In table 8, are the children under/over 12 counted in the other rows rating activity level? Why are those two columns in the table? Why aren't they rows?

3. If you gave the respondents any special instructions on how to interpret a question, it wouldn't hurt to include them.

4. If you have data for when individuals stopped self-identifying as Mormon, we could look at how long disaffected people tended to stay in the church before departing. I don't know what use that has though. :-) I'm kind of a data addict though, so I'm curious.

I have to run to work but will take a closer look later.

Interesting stuff, especially for a statistics-minded person such as myself.

Not particularly surprising though, and I seem to fit almost perfectly to the typical respondant.

Excellent....we are people...

It appears that the link to the results are dead. I am interested seeing the survey, as it relates to a discussion being held on the Standard Examiner website, under the blog called "Eye of Faith". Would someone be willing to send me the survey results, including an explanation of how the sampling was conducted.

Kindly

Erick

Sorry, just in case it was missed, my email is erick@prol.ws

Here you go, my man: http://www.truebelievingmormons.com/wp-content/uploads/Exmormon-Survey-Results.pdf

I let my original site go as I want to use a different domain name..."Exmormon Recovery" sounds too much like an initiative to save the lost sheep.

BTW as an update...the lovely Andrea Isom is lending her publishing and journalistic experience, and we will be interviewing experts as research for the book and posting those audios for all to hear when the time comes. Stay tuned for good stuff!