PILGRIMS' PROGRESS RESEARCH PROJECT NEWS UPDATES
March, 2010: Three articles on the WYD project for professional journals are in preparation, as well as several simpler and more popular discussions. Publication details will be posted on this site.
May 4, 2009: A major March 21, 2009: A special briefing paper was prepared for delegates to an International Conference on WYD convened in Rome by
the Pontifical Council for the Laity in April, 2009. February 28, 2009: The main data-collection stage of the project consisted of interviews with pilgrims before and after WYD, large-scale web-surveys before and after, and the
team's participant observation during the week of WYD. The 'fieldwork' stage was now complete. The next tasks are data-analysis and report-writing
Throughout 2009, presentations on the project and its findings were made to a wide variety of groups.
December 18, 2008: The "Reflections on World Youth Day" survey closed. Then followed a period of data cleaning and analysis. November 20, 2008: "Reflections on World Youth Day" launched -- the post-WYD
October 17-19, 2008: Preliminary Findings presented at Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
October 10, 2008: Launch of test version of the after-World Youth Day web survey.
Team members Michael Mason, Andrew Singleton and Ruth Webber presented papers outlining "preliminary findings" from the
"Pilgrims' Progress 2008" World Youth Day research project at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. [Click
The earlier plan was to wait until February or March, 2009 to conduct the internet survey of pilgrims. However our interviews with pilgrims convinced us
that this would be a mistake. We noticed how strongly the urgent concerns of everyday life claimed their full attention. Barangaroo seemed far away. We became convinced that after another six months, it would be difficult for
pilgrims to remember much detail of their WYD experiences, and hard for them to judge the effects of those experiences on their everyday life. So we decided to bring forward the survey. The pretest version was launched on October
10 to a sample of 411. Results will be analysed, and comments noted, guiding revisions prior to the launch of the main survey of English speaking pilgrims from many countries
September 22, 2008: Team completes first batch of 27 post-WYD long interviews with returned pilgrims. August 14, 2008: July 24, 2008: Stage II of the research project completed: July 1, 2008: End of Stage I of the project (pre-WYD). The research team are
This stage consisted of participant observation and
interviews during the week of events leading up to the climactic Papal Mass on the final Sunday of the World Youth Day celebrations. The team, expanded to twelve members for this week by the inclusion of international and local
collaborators, travelled to Sydney and attended all of the WYD events with their eyes and ears open. It turned out to be quite difficult to conduct interviews at any real depth with pilgrims during the event, but the team gathered a mass
of data from observation and informal conversations. They are at present collating this material. And to conclude this phase, they will be present in the coming weeks at debriefing sessions for returned groups, and will conduct
interviews with selected pilgrims, so as to check their observations against pilgrims' accounts of their own experience.
Finally, in Stage III of the project, those who attended will be invited to share their reflections on their
experience via a second internet survey.
After WYD, a great
deal of reflection, of many kinds, will take place. We will quickly release a summary of the survey findings, and, as analysis proceeds, a variety of other publications, as we move into the third stage of our research project: post-WYD, which
will involve both interviews and later, another internet survey. In this stage, we will be asking for pilgrims' reflections on the WYD experience and its aftermath.
May 30, 2008: Preliminary report on survey is sent to WYD Administration after a very rapid preliminary analysis of the survey data by the research team. That gave WYD Admin 6 weeks to do any 'tweaking' of the program that was still possible, and provided them with a detailed portrait of the pilgrims who are heading for Sydney.
May 15, 2008:
"Have Your Say" survey concludes. The WYD08 "Have Your Say" survey closed Thursday 15th after 2 weeks online. More than 9,000 pilgrims completed the entire survey, and another 3,000 provided partial, but still valuable
feedback. People also sent back lots of additional comments in email form. Some of these were queries about how to connect with the survey -- these were answered by the Help team at Australian Survey Research, the firm that mounted the survey
on the internet and hosted it on its servers. Other emails expressed additional suggestions for WYD events, which were immediately forwarded to the relevant WYD department. And there were comments and queries about the format and content of
the "Have your Say" survey itself. These were forwarded to the research team, and we were particularly grateful to those who took the trouble to write. We answered all of these -- providing additional information about the survey,
explaining the reasons for particular questions, or how the data is kept securely anonymous. May 14, 2008: