Briefly, what I’ve been investigating is how and why church websites get published. There are some truly great sites, but there are also some fairly dire examples. I discovered this when looking for a church myself. As an information professional, I have an interest in how decisions are made about the information content of sites. It’s also studying how the internet is now part of everyday life, and how churches are adapting or ignoring the new media.

First off I took a nationwide poll of how many churches had a findable website – picking 400 at random, then seeing if I could find a site by Googling. I did this five times over 3 years. Currently, around 2/3 of the churches had a site I could find, and this was an increase from the first census taken in 2009.

Secondly, looking in more detail at fewer sites, I did a content analysis of 137 websites. What information are they publishing? How current is it? Do they make provision for newcomers? Are there lots of photographs? Is there any interactivity?

Finally, in 2011 I interviewed church leaders, webmasters and interested parties: 18 interviews in total. Whilst it’s easy to see what is published, without talking to some of the people behind the churches I would not find out who was looking after the sites, what skills they had, where their information was taken from or how often the website was considered by the church as a whole. I’ve just started drafting the findings from these interviews.

So that’s it, in a nutshell. That’s 4 years thinking, reading, writing, interminably dull website counting or content coding, very interesting interviews, printer problems, computer meltdowns, trains to Lboro, reading on the train and looking out of the window. One more progression viva to go and I am officially a 5th year; aiming to write this all up by the end of the year.

I’ve got things more or less organised, and I’ve a scheme in my head of how the findings relate to the content analysis of the websites. I’ve got a huge amount of work to do on it, though, and I’ll admit that this hasn’t been the easiest of weekends. The solitariness has been tough. The fear of forgetting it all has been tricky. I keep coming across ideas that I have had that I have absolutely no recollection of whatsover. I did start to seriously doubt my sanity in undertaking this project; I’ve wondered about it before but this time I looked at what I need to do, looked at the time I have to do it in, and for want of a better word, wibbled.

Next time off is at Christmas and at that point I will be going back to my literature review and revising it with the newer work that has come out. I’ve not read my own review for several months, so that is going to be interesting.

All this is building up to my 4th year review, and the research symposium I will be part of, on 19 January.

I gave two presentations, one of which included some links to sources for numerical confidence and a better understanding of real-world statistics. Here they are:

Bad Science
Understanding Uncertainty
Junk Charts
Numbers Rule Your World
Freakonomics
R4’s More or Less

The Correlation and Causation cartoon is from here, and the Parish Computer cartoon is from here.

Hope these help…

I have continued to contact and interview various church leaders in the Chelmsford Diocesan area. I’ve had some very interesting conversations, and without much analysis, I’m seeing several themes. None of which would suprise anyone who’s worked with a local church. Today I bit the bullet and did a job I hate, telephoning prospective interviewees. I have a real horror of making cold calls; much preferring to email. But, not all these churches have an email contact that I can use… so back to the telephone it is. I spoke to three people of the eight I tried; two of whom agreed to be interviewed next weet. One who very grumpily put the phone down on me. Glad I wasn’t one of his parishoners with a sensitive problem.

I’m transcribing as I go, using my iPhone and a very old EEE PC – mostly on the train to work, which is a good use of time as far as I cam concerned. I have been playing around with Atlas.ti which is now my most favourite piece of software, mainly because of its panic button. I do intend to use this as a tool for analysis.

This week I’ll be at the second Research2 conference in Loughborough, presenting a short guide to not making idiotic statistical mistakes, and a how-to guide on quantitative content analysis.

And in vaguely related activities, I’ve begun to plan a talk at Greenbelt with Bex Lewis and Simon Jenkins; and agreed to help at social media surgeries run by Graham Richards. And, I’ve got a new job. So I’ve not been entirely slacking off…

The morning session featured speakers Heidi Campbell, Brenda Brasher, Scott Thumma and Lorne Dawson. I didn’t learn anything new, because I’ve read most of their stuff – but hearing the discussions and recent research was a good refresher on the arguments around community and engagement with online and offline religious groups. The afternoon began with a keynote speech from @Digitalnun, otherwise known as Sr Catherine Wybourne from the community at East Hendred – “two nuns and a dog” with a reach into 119 countries via their online presence.

The last session dealt with extremism, but was contraversial. The other talks had mostly focused on Christianity, which was interesting but perhaps a narrow outlook given the mixed audience. Whilst I appreciated hearing from the speakers whose work I am using in my PhD I’d have liked to have learned how other major religions were approaching the issues around online communication. The final session encompassed Islam  – but only in terms of extremism. Comments from the audience suggested other people had noticed this imbalance too.

This didn’t detract from a worthwhile day, though; and the livestreaming and Twitter conversations opened the event up to a much wider audience than just those in the room.

On the one hand I am enormously grateful for the help and time people have offered to tell me about their situation. On the other, I’ve been surprised by the number of emails which have not even resulted in a polite ‘no thanks.’ I have perhaps an incidental measure of the effectiveness of the chains of online communication within some local churches. Does no reply mean the email did not reach its intended target? Have I just added to an already groaning inbox? Or does my request really not warrant an acknowledgement…

• I’ve got a good baseline on the number of church websites
• I’ve got the content analysis of 147 websites well underway
• I’ve piloted interview questions and so far have four interviews to begin this phase of the study with
• I’ve got a literature review, methods section and fledgling results on the go.

Last week a piece was published in the Baptist Times on my work and there’s been interest from other places too.

In 2010 I made a whole bunch of new contacts in the church social media world, so much so that I’m thinking about not including any more research papers in my literature review unless I have had a pint with the authors.

I’m pretty pleased with this progress – although the things-to-do list never shrinks, and I could really do with a secret day stashed in between Sunday and Monday.

It’s probably a legacy of my first degree – Psychology, where I learned to calculate statistics on paper – that my inclination tends to be towards quantitative methods. Give me graphs, give me numbers, give me spreadsheets and I am happy. Therefore dealing with qualitative interview data is going to be a whole new learning experience. There will always be times when counting tick box answers is the most appropriate method of investigating a question. But it will miss subtle differences, and doesn’t allow the kind of ‘yes, but…’ answer that can be really illuminating. In particular, I want to talk to people with little or no experience of creating content online. So as long as I want real opinions, interviews are the way to go. This approach is also going to allow me the pleasure of meeting and talking with people I don’t know, and that is always an interesting part of life.

This has been an interesting exercise. The number of findable websites has increased for all the four mainstream denominations that I looked at, but the rate of change has been different for all four. For the first time in December 2011 the well-known search engine I used returned two Facebook pages for churches, rather than a stand-alone website. That may or may not be indicative of an interesting trend. Data is below – I’m still thinking about what other stories these numbers may tell.

With the end of my third year fast approaching the rest of my New Years holidays will be spent finalising my report, planning for a PhD research day in the department on 7 February and starting to try to recruit potential interview volunteers for 2011.

Happily my 3rd year report has pretty much written itself this year. I’ve made what feels like good progress: I’ve got interesting numbers from the content analysis of church websites. I’ve got interesting data on the number of churches with or without websites. I’ve got some great comments from pilot interviews.

This year, too, I’ve attended a couple of conferences which have helped me feel connected to the rest of the research community helping my PhD feel like a real project rather than just something to idle away wet weekend afternoons.

And I’ve learned to live with a never-ending to-do list. Living with the feeling that as one task is completed, two more spring up to take its place, and that there are surely more than 168 hours in the week if I just keep looking hard enough!

So, the formal end of year report will document the methods, the preliminary results, the training, the corrections made and the contacts nurtured. But perhaps the real progress has been in making that sustained effort over the marathon distance.