James W. Phillips and Dr. Kristin Hansen, Counseling and Career Center

I consider this ORCA project to be a successful one on all accounts. The goals that were originally outlined at the onset of this project (forming an original research paper and presenting at a major academic conference) were met and future collaborations with Dr. Kristin Hansen suggest that we can publish our work in a scholarly journal. From the beginning, through the completion of the ORCA grant project, and continuing until the present, this mentored learning experience has been a fulfilling and productive endeavor.

The origins of this research began on Dr. Hansen’s own project, which I worked for as a research assistant. During the process of researching her work, which studied LDS converts’ post conversion identity development, we noticed that several other areas of research were possible using the same data. These data we collected involved 40 in-depth interviews with converts of the Church. In conjunction with Dr. Hansen, I pursued this ORCA grant’s research topic: analyzing how social relationships influence the conversion experience.

This research analyzed the descriptions that each convert gave for how their friends and family members played a role in their conversion experience. With the funding from the ORCA grant, I was able to spend a portion of the summer of 2009 analyzing the trends and patterns among these converts’ descriptions, run further analysis of these patterns by demographic and life characteristics using qualitative research software, and write an original research paper on the findings. We were accepted to present our research paper to an academic conference, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Denver, Colorado. I was able to represent our research team and Brigham Young University by attending the conference and had a successful presentation experience.

Since the conference at SSSR this summer, I received requests from other scholars to read our paper. One of them was a member of the research services division of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. It seems that the research we were able to uncover is helping us understand religious conversion better, not only within the academic and scholarly undertakings of the sociology of religion and LDS conversion, but also within the applied research and non-LDS audiences as well.

To give a brief summary of the findings of our paper, I offer these key points. Foremost is the following key finding: religious conversion is less about the proximity of social relationships and more about relationship salience. It seems that regardless of the encouraging or discouraging to convert, the immediate family and friend social influences matter less than the highly strong, salient relationship. In other words, even with a social network that could be either highly encouraging or highly discouraging of someone’s decision to join the LDS Church, the key social factor was from the social influence most salient in that person’s life. We consistently found this main finding across the converts of our sample. Who that “highly impacting to the decision to convert” relationship is, however, followed several interesting few patterns.

For adolescent aged converts, regardless the backgrounds of ethnicity, one or both parent figures were most often the salient social factor. For them, family was the salient social relationship. For older converts, the pattern shifted in that people in this age demographic more often emphasized friends’ influences. These older, working adults emphasized friends as bringing a sense of community to their lives. Furthermore, the younger, college-aged converts had a different emphasis. They described friends’ influences primarily as acting as a vehicle of contact to the Church. So, college aged converts emphasize friend influences more as “introducers” to the Church while older converts emphasize their friends as “bringers” of a sense of community.

Our findings also had an interesting cultural note. We were able to test whether there were differences in the emphasis of family across the cultural background of the converts in our sample. We found that our sample’s Caucasian-American converts and East Asian converts emphasized family about equally as often when describing their conversion; however, the types of family descriptions were slightly different. The East Asian converts described the importance of family influence to their conversion because family is important to them for any life issue, be it religious conversion or otherwise. On the other hand, Caucasian-American converts described family influence because of what they perceived their family might think of the decision to convert. These converts emphasized family because of potential reactions they might receive, whereas East Asians emphasized family because they are more important to them in general—a more “internal” influence of family.

Several other findings also emerged that provided further insights to understanding the social aspects of religious conversion, too lengthy to appropriately address here. Overall, our paper was well received at the SSSR conference and this project is still continuing at present. We hope to continue revising and preparing this research paper to submit to a scholarly publication in the near future. These findings have broadened the understanding of social aspects of conversion and hopefully will be given placement among the literature

There is one final note worth mentioning about this research experience. To my knowledge an ORCA grant has never been given to student whose mentor is a faculty member of the Counseling and Career Center. It should be emphasized that this collaboration is the first of its kind and that it has been a highly successful one.