And the survey says ...

By Barbara D. Kiernan, M.A.'90

In 2003, Fairfield's office of Catholic and Jesuit Mission and Identity began exploring ways to link faculty who wanted to incorporate a service component into their research and teaching, with social agencies that needed, but could not pay for, such high-level work. In consultation with interested faculty, Fairfield proceeded to establish a formal relationship with the national office of Jesuit Social Ministries in Washington, D.C., a partnership that would allow their research to have an international dimension as well. The arrangement would also engage University students in the work of gathering valuable data for the Ministries' many relief and social agencies.

Soon thereafter, half a dozen Fairfield faculty members began working on such projects - among them one for the international Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC). Enter Dr. Kurt Schlichting, professor of sociology and anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences. JVC had wanted to conduct a comprehensive national survey of former program volunteers. Its hope was to demonstrate to potential volunteers, benefactors, and grantors what the leadership already knew anecdotally: that a post-graduation year of community service, prayer, and simple living carries forward into volunteers' adult lives and benefits their communities.

Dr. Schlichting agreed to do the survey and selected Amy Boczer, a graduate assistant pursuing her MBA in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business, to join him in it. Soon after she graduated in 1999, he had tapped the sociology major to assist him on some institutional research he was doing, and she discovered that she not only had a knack for, but also loved, the whole research process. "As Amy demonstrated more and more competence, I was able to give her more and more responsibility. She has developed a real expertise in analyzing research data," says Dr. Schlichting. She also writes the computer code that interprets the data. At his suggestion, she enrolled in Fairfield's MBA program and will graduate in December 2006 with a specialty in marketing. "I never expected to be doing any of this," says Boczer, clearly pleased by the influence of her mentor, his confidence in her, and the discovery of hidden gifts.

Those gifts came into play big-time as she worked with Pam Krinock, executive director of JVC South, and Dr. Schlichting to develop the survey questions and construct a mailing list. The latter involved months of effort, as the records and contact information were not up-to-date, plus the former volunteers spanned four decades and lived in every region of the country. Ultimately, the mail out/mail back questionnaire went to a stratified sample of 5,000 and garnered a very high 37 percent response rate.

To ensure accurate comparative data, the eight-page, 59-question survey included a number of questions asked in the General Social Survey (GSS) conducted annually by the National Opinion Research Center. "Dr. Schlichting had me go through the GSS for relevant questions we could replicate in our survey. They allowed us to compare with greater certainty the responses of regular college graduates and the JVC group," says Boczer. "Replication in a survey is not plagiarism," explains Dr. Schlichting, "but instead helps validate the results." In this case, he says, they wanted to look at how the former JVs answered among themselves and how they compared to a national group of respondents.

Those results began arriving in May 2004. Boczer supervised a team of eight undergraduates as they mastered the intricacies of entering all that information into SPSS®, a software program that end-users then program to "slice and dice" data in myriad ways. Entering it took an entire summer. "Amy managed a significant data input process," says Dr. Schlichting. "There were nearly 2,000 hard copy surveys to enter, and they included open-ended questions that needed to be transcribed, coded, and organized to make sense."

Once entered, analyzing the data would take months more. "Amy took the first cut at the data analysis," he says, "cross-tabulating by region, age categories, and other factors to see what was going on." Their ensuing discussions also included a talented undergraduate, Kristy Wilson '06. The resulting report - 46 pages long - revealed some amazing findings about former Jesuit volunteers (see list).

"Intuitively we knew that former volunteers work in practical and concrete ways to transform society," says Krinock. "The research done by Dr. Schlichting and Ms. Boczer has helped us verify and quantify the ways in which they do it. Because we found it so important, we have shared the research with the Catholic Network of Volunteer Service and its approximately 200-member programs, which are similar to JVC in mission. The Fairfield study has done much to substantiate our claims of preparing people who will transform society."

Imagine extracting from more than 2,000 surveys - each 59 questions long - statistically valid information about a group whose age spans four decades, who live all over the country, and who graduated from hundreds of public and private universities. That's precisely the project Dr. Kurt Schlichting and graduate assistant Amy Boczer did for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

• 97% of former Jesuit Volunteers (FJVs) who marry remain married.
• FJV household income mirrors that of other college-educated adults.
• More than 96% of FJVs make annual charitable donations, even those who earn less than $25,000 (vs. 89%).
• Their average annual donations are 25% higher than their counterparts.
• 28.2% work in education, followed by healthcare (8.5%) and social services (8.3%).
• More than 80 percent are active in their communities (vs. 44%)
• More than 66% attend church weekly or almost weekly (vs. 24%).
• Two-thirds at tended Jesuit or other Catholic colleges and universities.