Signtist wrote:Goody, goody! Just what I wanted: homework!
Let me try to summarize badly based on my memory ... but Elizabeth Loftus would point out my memory is flawed in many predictable ways, so consider yourself warned ;->
Even anonymous polls generally reflect what the pollster wanted to hear because people imagine themselves writing their answers to someone. In a smaller church, they may also think about the effect their answers might have on the church or worrying about what happens if their answer results in some kind of investigation. So if an anonymous poll comes back clean, I don't think that means your church is clean. If you tell people to search themselves carefully to see if they can remember any hint of past sexual abuse, and that shows up on your anonymous poll, that may also be an artifact of what you did.
In general, interviews are better than polls for this kind of information, but that can't be anonymous and the interviewer can easily influence results. Interviewers need to be trained to do this well because it's very easy to plant memories or suppress them. Remember false memory syndrome? The opposite also happens. And both happen with well-intentioned interviewers.
Elizabeth Loftus started out with eyewitness testimony in court. In one of her experiments she showed several mock juries a film of a car driving through an intersection and hitting another car. In some mock juries, a lawyer asked if the car had stopped at the stop sign. Almost everyone on these juries clearly remembered the car ignoring the stop sign and driving straight into the other car. There was no stop sign in the film.
It's very easy to influence people's memories in one way or another. The most accurate way to get memories was simply to ask people to tell the whole story from start to finish, asking them to fill in detail without suggesting the answer. "Was there a stop sign?" is fine, but even then you want to wait until they tell you about the car at the intersection because their memories will be most accurate if they tell the narrative in the way they remember it.
In the long run, one of the best things you can do is make sure that everyone knows it is always safe to tell anything that is disturbing and encourage people to share their daily experiences with each other. And to also make sure there are safe adults in addition to the parents in the lives of each child. But that's hard.
None of this is easy.
Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?
