Caught this article about the reasons why people leave Mormonism in the UVSC student paper. I was impressed that it was in the paper, first off. But secondly, I was impressed that it was honest about the reasons given. Shocker: We didn’t all leave because we were banging our secretary, poolboy, etc. or drinking or looking at porn online (not that those aren’t fun in their own right ;). We left because it isn’t plausible.
My question: Anyone know where the original poll was conducted?
That looks suspiciously like Hellmut’s poll over on FLAK. 😉
Cool that it got picked up by the media!!!
Thanks for the link. I was hoping it would have a few more responses, but I guess the few it had are informative in and of themselves.
It was a straw poll on FLAK. The critics are right that the sample is not representative.
In a sense, that does not matter though. We all know why people leave the Mormon Church. They might go inactive over a guilty conscience, embarrassment or hurt feelings. Those are not reasons that typically apply to those of us who have resigned.
Makes sense. I really would love to conduct a good, representative survey of ex-Mormons though. In my day job that would be awesome data to have. The problem, of course, is getting contact information on former Mormons – not likely.
If you had a large survey of Utah residents, lets say eight or sixteen thousand then there would be a sufficiently large sub-sample of former Mormons for analysis.
The only way to obtain a sample of that size would be a research project that relies on undergraduate interviewers from several colleges such as the KBYU Utah Colleges Exit Poll.
Of course, there is the problem that Utah Mormons have lots of reasons to hide their real feelings and they have become quite good at it, too. Therefore a survey is a rather limited research tool for this question.
Hellmut, you’re absolutely right, but there would also be another big problem: Most of the data I have seen on Mormons seems to indicate that Utah Mormons are different than non-Utah Mormons. I don’t think the differences are as big as some researchers indicate, but if there is any difference, that would probably carry over to non-Utah ex-Mormons. Ergo, a good survey would have to include ex-Mormons outside of Utah as well. And, well, that’s virtually impossible. I think you’d have better luck working via a snowball sampling technique (which is what I may end up doing if I ever pursue this project). Even so, I liked the survey you did – and I liked even better that it was picked up by a paper in Utah 😉
Yes, I agree. Polls are not well suited to study that population because we do not know who they are and how to find them without introducing bias.
There are other methods such as participant observation.