The goal of the Fuller Youth Institute’s Sticky Faith Families Project was to unearth common practices in the effective transmission of faith from parents to children.
Since the subjects in the initial College Transition Project (described in
) were high school and college students, this subsequent study was designed to complement and flesh out its initial findings through a parent counterpart titled the Sticky Faith Families Project.
Participants
Representatives from FYI contacted fifty-six student ministry pastors from our Sticky Faith Cohort churches and asked them to submit online the names, contact information, and number and ages of children of up to five exemplar parents via SurveyMonkey.
The fifty-six nominators were given the following criteria for potential parent participants.
1.
The parent has an expressed, ongoing personal relationship with Christ.
2.
One or more of their children has an expressed, ongoing personal relationship with Christ.
3.
They have incorporated at least one of the following values or activities in their family.
• Discussions about faith, theology, personal spirituality
• Involvement in intergenerational community and relationships
• Vacations and holidays geared to build family intimacy and/or faith maturity
• Service projects or activities involving both parents and children
• Integration of grandparents and/or other extended family in the faith development of children
Nominators also included a brief description of why they nominated the parent(s).
Twenty-seven youth pastors responded by nominating a total of eighty-eight sets of parents.
Of those eighty-eight sets of parents, forty-one agreed to participate in the study.
(Note: While we use the term “set” here, we are referring to either a single- or a double-parent family system.
We interviewed some married parents as individuals, some married parents as couples, and some single parents.)
Other demographics of the subjects were as follows:
STATE DISTRIBUTION
DENOMINATION
California: 14
Nondenominational: 12
Wisconsin: 6
Presbyterian (PCUSA): 10
Iowa: 4
Reformed Church of America: 7
Minnesota: 4
Evangelical Free: 4
Michigan: 4
Nazarene: 3
Arkansas: 3
United Methodist: 3
Texas: 2
Church of Christ: 1
Idaho: 2
Lutheran: 1
Arizona: 1
Missouri: 1
Methodology
The research method was a semistructured interview format.
Subjects participated in sixty-minute to seventy-five-minute phone interviews with a research team member.
The interview proper consisted of nine questions, with follow-up questions asked as appropriate for clarification or elaboration.
The primary questions used for the interviews were:
1.
In the midst of any busy seasons your family has experienced, how have you tried to stay connected with your children?
2.
When have you tended to have your best conversations about faith with your children?
Why do you think those conversations went well?
3.
What, if any, impact have intergenerational relationships (that is, your child being connected to other adults) made in your child’s life and spiritual development?
4.
What, if anything, have you done to try to make your vacations or extended time away with your children meaningful for your family?
5.
In what ways have you tried to structure your home environment so that it was a nurturing space for your family’s faith development?
6.
In what ways have you tried to instill in your children a heart for those who are poor or engage in service together as a family?
7.
Looking back, what do you wish you had done differently when it comes to instilling or sharing your faith with your children?
8.
What advice would you want to share with parents of young children?
Are there particular events or experiences in your own parenting that motivate you to share that advice?
If so, would you be open to sharing those?
9.
What advice would you want to share with parents of adolescents?
Are there particular events or experiences in your own parenting that motivate you to share that advice?
If so, would you be willing to share them?
These interviews were scheduled and took place (forty on the phone, one in person) in July, August, and early September of 2012.
Four trained interviewers conducted the interviews, including Dr. Kara Powell.
The responses were recorded and were subsequently transcribed.
Each transcription was reviewed for accuracy by the respective interviewer.
Data Analysis
The interview team met at the completion of the interviews and transcription.
Questions and general themes were discussed among team members.
Following this meeting, each team member individually coded three interviews, and at a subsequent meeting, the team corroborated primary and secondary themes for ongoing coding by two team members.
These two researchers then coded all of the interviews, beginning again with three transcripts, discussing their coding for consistency, and moving forward through the interview corpus.
The entire team reviewed the coding following this process, identifying emerging trends, clustered themes, and cross-domain themes.
From this work, additional research literature was consulted prior to meetings with focus groups to discuss preliminary findings.
Following this process, focus groups were held with leaders gathered at two Sticky Faith Cohort summits in February 2013.
General themes and insights were shared, along with a set of questions geared to elicit insights, observations, and further questions.
Leaders in the focus groups spoke both from the perspective of their work with parents in ministry as well as from their experiences as parents (for those who were also parents).
Subsequent Interviews and Focus Groups
Given the input received in the February 2013 focus groups, the same research team that completed the first forty-one interviews collected more data.
An additional focus group was conducted with single parents in March 2013 in order to gain insight from that particular subgroup on the initial findings.
In May and June 2013, nine additional interviews were conducted by Dr. Kara Powell with parents known through the networks of the Fuller Youth Institute.
Special attention was given to selecting interview subjects who not only fit the initial nomination criteria but also could help answer questions raised in the February 2013 focus groups or who could help bring more racial, ethnic, and socio
economic diversity to the pool of participants, since the initial round of interviews didn’t yield the desired diverse representation.
In addition to answering some of the previous nine interview questions, respondents were asked to respond to a portion of these additional questions:
1.
In the midst of your own busyness, how have you tried to develop your own relationship with God?
In other words, how have you “tended your own flame”?
2.
What specifically have you done to strengthen your marriage in the midst of parenting?
3.
Often parents are aware of what they do wrong and the mistakes they make.
How have you tried to forgive yourself for your parenting mistakes and flaws?
4.
How do you try to show your kids grace when they blow it?
5.
What have you done to try to control your anger toward your kids?
6.
What practices or habits in your family helped you develop a closer relationship with your kid when he or she was in preschool or elementary school?
7.
What practices or habits in your family helped you develop a closer relationship with your kid when he or she was in middle school or high school?
8.
How did you try to get involved in your teenager’s world (meaning their hobbies, friendships, and school or extracurricular experiences)?
9.
As a mom, what did you do to try to build your relationship with your child?
10.
As a dad, what did you do to try to build your relationship with your child?
11.
What did you do to try to prepare your graduating high school senior for what they would face after graduation?
(This preparation could be spiritual, relational, or logistical.)
12.
What did you do to make your home and family a safe place to talk about your child’s tough questions, struggles, and even doubts?
13.
What happened in your family that helped your child really own their own faith?
14.
What else do you think I would want to know about who your family is or what your family does?
