The 2017-18 Global Church Member Survey conducted by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is designed to assess the quinquennial Church Strategic Plan (2015-2020). In designing this survey, we considered a variety of theoretical frameworks that could explain relationships between the target outcomes in the Strategic Plan. The resulting novel theoretical framework is based on Biblical principles and an integration of a number of frameworks in the social sciences: motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2008; Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt, 2008; Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Goldenberg, 2003; Ryan & Deci, 2000) and hope (Bernardo, 2010; Snyder, 2002) from psychology, faith development (Dudley, 1994; Ji, 2004) from religious studies, social bonding (Hirschi, 1969; Yang et al., 2017) from sociology, and social capital (Häuberer, 2011; Putnam, 2003) from economics and development. Our integration proposes that religious actions are motivated by on-going social relationships and hope for the future; those motivations can be directed towards other human beings or towards God. In our poster, we will provide a description of this integrated framework, summarize the research literature justifying the framework, and propose lines of research that are emphasized through this theoretical framing. In particular, we focus on the possibilities within this data set for examining the motivational profiles (the levels and combinations of the four motivational types in the framework) of individuals with disabilities (Kaye & Raghavan, 2002; Snyder, 2000), with different family routines (Fiese, 2006), with different conversion experiences (Granqvist, 2003), and from different historical-cultural backgrounds (Stark, 2011).
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/karl_bailey/97/
Portions of this work were funded by a grant from the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. Additional funding was provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Andrews University Office of Research and Creative Scholarship.