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I about how people keep track of ward success. One of the indicators of success used by Church leaders is Sacrament attendance. In our situation, this statistic does not necessarily indicate how we are being successful in ministering to people. When I asked if there were other statistics that we could use that could show positive spiritual development, I was shot down and I was told that this was the measure used by leadership to compare our progress against other church units. How does your church unit keep statistics, and what are the most successful indicators of spiritual growth on a ward basis?
Temple recommends active by eligible holders Ministering visits
Number of active priesthood holders
% of total members attending at least monthly
Those are mostly the others I hear comparing wards.
I wish we used these measures — based on feedback from members in the Ward. I answer No to all of them. Community
1. I have friends in this ward to whom I can tell anything.
2. I feel that I matter to other members of the Ward.
3. I feel close to others in the Ward.
4. I regularly talk to other members of the Ward about personal matters.
5. I feel that I can rely on other members of this Ward.
And then perhaps these measures:
Learning and Growth
1. I feel this Ward satisfies me in my pursuit of spiritual goals.
2. I feel the Ward gives me ample opportunities to learn.
3. I feel the Ward inspires me to want to learn more about the gospel.
4. I share the spiritual values of others in the Ward.
5. I am satisfied with the spiritual growth I achieve as a member of the Ward
These are adaptations of the Classroom and School inventory, meant to measure the extent to which people feel community in a school. I think the Community Questions above would really guide leaders in how they run their Wards.
Do any feel you can say “yes’ to any of the items in the Community section above? If so, which ones?
There is not an objective measurement of subjective concepts, so the Church focuses on things that can me measured objectively, even if they don’t tell nearly the whole story. There are active members who are absolutely horrible examples of Christian fellowship and inactive or less active members who are wonderful examples. The same is true of perhaps every other measurable indicator. However, when it comes down to it, those objective indices really are the only things that can be measured with any degree of reliability and validity – so they get measured.
Replacing HT/VT with ministering shows the leadership understands what I just said, since it replaces measurable stats with ambiguous interviews, but they still have to use stats to plan new units, build temples, allocate resources, etc. There simply isn’t any other way.
Old Timer wrote:
There is not an objective measurement of subjective concepts, so the Church focuses on things that can me measured objectively, even if they don’t tell nearly the whole story.Curtis — I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. The scale above has been tested psychometrically, and then validated against other measures of community. I got it from a scholarly journal where psychometrists tested it for reliability and validity, as well as for the distinct factors in the overall scale. Even if it’s not perfect, it would give leaders a really good idea of how much community they are creating. The psychometrists go to great lengths to compare the results of the test above with other measures of community, including things like interviews with people, and other measures that produce a variety of different kinds of validity. I did my dissertation research in this area.
Later you commented:
Quote:However, when it comes down to it, those objective indices [from SD — the hard measures like % of active members with TR’s] really are the only things that can be measured with any degree of reliability and validity – so they get measured.
Not so from a psychometric perspective. You CAN measure soft items, and they often drive the hard, objective, business oriented measures you mentioned above. I believe it’s worth testing the underlying, soft measures, improving them, and then seeing a rise in the hard, objective measures.
Quote:Replacing HT/VT with ministering shows the leadership understands what I just said, since it replaces measurable stats with ambiguous interviews, but they still have to use stats to plan new units, build temples, allocate resources, etc. There simply isn’t any other way.
They may continue to use the hard stats to make decisions about temples, allocate resources, etcetera, but I think they will find those hard metrics will improve as you fix the causes.
Look at it this way — let’s say you are measuring the stability of buildings in a hurricane — the hard measure is the dollars of damage to the building after the hurricane. You discover that a driver of “no damage” is whether the roof is made of metal or shingles. You find metal roofs are stronger, so you build new homes with metal roofs. As a result, the buildings withstand hurricanes without damage, reducing damage costs.
If I can draw a business example, the hard metrics are profitability and sales growth. These measures are driven by soft measures such as customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. Each of these items has their own sub-components which leaders can influence. Fix those things, and the profitability and sales growth increases.
I don’t want to come off as offensive, but your assessment above, including the statement “there isn’t any other way” is a wholesale rejection of decades of theory and practice regarding scale development. We rarely measure how the members are feeling about their ward, their community, but I bet that if we did, and made efforts to improve those measures, we would see a corresponding rise in the hard metrics.
I would like to know how the people here feel about the metrics below — how many of them can you say “yes” to? How many could you say “yes” to when you were full-on active?
Community
1. I have friends in this ward to whom I can tell anything.
2. I feel that I matter to other members of the Ward.
3. I feel close to others in the Ward.
4. I regularly talk to other members of the Ward about personal matters.
5. I feel that I can rely on other members of this Ward.
SilentDawning wrote:I would like to know how the people here feel about the metrics below — how many of them can you say “yes” to? How many could you say “yes” to when you were full-on active?
Community
1. I have friends in this ward to whom I can tell anything.
2. I feel that I matter to other members of the Ward.
3. I feel close to others in the Ward.
4. I regularly talk to other members of the Ward about personal matters.
5. I feel that I can rely on other members of this Ward.
Psychometrics or not, if I know there is a specific outcome being sought I can answer those questions in a way to make it appear the way I want it to. They are in the end subjective. (Yes, I know statistics/metrics take that into account.) My answers to the above questions, which I am about to give, are also somewhat dependent on my mood and might be different this week as compared to next week.
1. I have one, maybe two, friends in the church I could tell anything. I have no such friends outside the church. Just because I might be able to tell them anything I don’t. And I couldn’t tell anyone (inside or outside the church) absolutely anything and wouldn’t.
2. I have no idea and frankly don’t care. That’s not why I go.
3. There are a couple I feel close to. I am personally satisfied with my relationships with other wards members.
4. I do not by choice. Why the heck would I? I generally don’t talk to anyone about personal matters, they’re my personal business.
5. I think so. If I were to be in need of something (my basement floods, for instance) I could call my ministering brother (we have a married couple) and while he might not come and start baling/pumping himself he would arrange for help to come.
I do not think these answers were different when I was full TBM, except perhaps number 5.
There is a report called “key indicators.” At the ward level it tracks: Sacrament meeting attendance %
- Endowed adults with TR %
- Priesthood attendance %
- Relief Society attendance %
- YM attendance %
- YW attendance %
- Men holding the MP %
- Members submitting temple ordinances %
- First four generations of family in family tree %
speaker wrote:
When I asked if there were other statistics that we could use that could show positive spiritual development, I was shot down and I was told that this was the measure used by leadership to compare our progress against other church units.
I don’t think determining a unit’s progress by comparing it to other units is the best plan. It feels too competitive to me. That and I don’t think comparing one unit to another is helpful, different units have different challenges. If we’re really stuck on the numbers it would be better to compare a unit’s numbers with the same unit’s historical numbers. Even that approach is problematic IMO.
I understand the need to have an “at a glance” report to determine the health of a church unit, though such a report could never tell the full story. We like the at a glance reports, they are helpful.
One thing some workplaces do is issue a yearly employee satisfaction survey. Perhaps we could borrow from that idea. The survey wouldn’t have things like:
I like my bishop:
[strongly disagree] [slightly disagree] [neutral] [slightly agree] [strongly agree]
But it might have things like :
I feel spiritually nourished by church attendance:
[strongly disagree] [slightly disagree] [neutral] [slightly agree] [strongly agree]
SilentDawning wrote:
I would like to know how the people here feel about the metrics below — how many of them can you say “yes” to? How many could you say “yes” to when you were full-on active?Community
1. I have friends in this ward to whom I can tell anything.
2. I feel that I matter to other members of the Ward.
3. I feel close to others in the Ward.
4. I regularly talk to other members of the Ward about personal matters.
5. I feel that I can rely on other members of this Ward.
Question #1: 2-3 (with boundaries to protect them and myself)
Question #2: It’s complicated…
a)
Growing Up= 4-5, “…Mormons do first stage of life well…” b)
Best ward in California while married= 3 (we had a really good home teacher who put us more at ease and made us feel we mattered) c)
Pre-transition in branch= 3-4 (I have some friends with whom I can talk about hard things. Having an additional needs family hangs your heart out on the sleeve of your coat sometimes.) NOTE: From the time I was a teenager I figured out that there would be no one to whom I could tell everything to – not even my husband. When you tell a person something, it is like handing them an embossed invitation into your world, your experiences. Some parts of my personal life are not worth handing out that invitation – either for their sake, or mine. That being said, I tell my husband many things, and he has an VIP access pass to my world and experiences (as much as is translatable). One of the things we have been humbled by in accepting an Asperger’s Autism self-diagnosis for myself is how diverse our thinking really is and how some concepts just don’t translate. We have learned that not only do we have to clarify specific meanings of words for us to hold in common, but we have to parse them as well. We were not prepared for the level of parsing we undertake to grow a mostly thriving marriage.
That being said, I got lucky in my current branch situation. There are key people in my life because of the branch who have made weighty things bearable, who celebrate our successes in empathy and mourn with us our setbacks.
nibbler wrote:
One thing some workplaces do is issue a yearly employee satisfaction survey. Perhaps we could borrow from that idea.
I like this idea. Unfortunately, it feels like the Church has more of a “take it or leave it but you better not leave it” attitude. If you’re are not “satisfied” or “fulfilled” by Church, it’s your own fault. What matters is what you can do for the Church, not what church can do for you.
Do any of you purposefully not mark the attendance records, or is it just me? Maybe it’s the wrong place to take a moral stand. Maybe I’m just a rebel
😈 . But those attendance metrics seem to be missing the point for me. I’ve too often felt like “just a number” with the Church, and it bothers me.We could do a simple net promoter score… https://youtu.be/qWKipJefrN8https://youtu.be/qWKipJefrN8” class=”bbcode_url”> …and count that as member missionary work…I recommend this church to friends and family…that’s missionary minded.
It’s a simple measure of brand loyalty. And comments on detractors could go to ward council to address those issues instead of guessing at what people need in their ministering visits.
Heber13 wrote:
We could do a simple net promoter score…https://youtu.be/qWKipJefrN8https://youtu.be/qWKipJefrN8” class=”bbcode_url”> …and count that as member missionary work…I recommend this church to friends and family…that’s missionary minded.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/Tm7vFiK.jpg [/img] It
doeslook kinda like Elder Cook. …and Elder Eyring.
…and Elder Oaks.
…and Elder Nelson.
…and Elder Renlund.
I get the feeling that if we asked that question at church, on a 0 to 10 scale how likely is it you would recommend the church to friends and family, that we would feel pressured into answering 9 or 10 and we wouldn’t get completely honest answers. To say nothing of the selection bias (asking people that attend church as opposed to all members).
nibbler wrote:
I get the feeling that if we asked that question at church, on a 0 to 10 scale how likely is it you would recommend the church to friends and family, that we would feel pressured into answering 9 or 10 and we wouldn’t get completely honest answers.But it is an anonymous survey…to try to reduce the pressure. That’s how companies do it with their customers. And less important than the “score” is the feedback. The best companies are open to feedback on how to improve.
Quote:To say nothing of the selection bias (asking people that attend church as opposed to all members).
Good point…which…hopefully would help us try to ask everyone. And be open to feedback.
You’ll always get feedback on the ones just trying to please their leaders and say nice things, and you’ll always get the haters that will never be pleased no matter what you do…but what you hope to mine from a simply survey is those that have valid points on what it would take in that area to improve to where more people promote than detract from your message.
IDK…maybe it doesn’t work…just a simple thing some big companies do.
I understand psychometrics, and I don’t disagree with your list, SD, or the idea of using such assessments for what they can tell us. However, they aren’t objective measures of the things that have to be measured to determine lots of things that have to be factored into decisions regarding church units. What I meant to say and apparently failed in my response to the original post, NOT to your lists, is that we simply can’t do away with the kind of stats the Church currently uses for very good reasons.
Heber13 wrote:
But it is an anonymous survey…to try to reduce the pressure. That’s how companies do it with their customers. And less important than the “score” is the feedback. The best companies are open to feedback on how to improve.
But the trouble is, most members have it drilled into them that this is God’s one and only true Church. Even if they wouldn’t recommend it, they’d feel ashamed of not recommending it. As the old hymn says,
Quote:“He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”
There is no anonymity when it comes to the highest power.
Quote:There is no anonymity when it comes to the highest power.
yes…that’s true. Also…I think most Mormons are raised to look at the bright side of things in the church, and not murmur…they can be annoyingly nice a lot. So… maybe feedback wouldn’t be so helpful.
And if they did get critical constructive feedback…they might just dismiss it as…”they don’t understand the mind of God like we do.”
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