Saturday, April 22, 2017

New $1.5 million grant to fund national research on faith and work

Featured Stories – Rice University News & Media



A $1.5 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. will enable researchers from Rice University and Seattle Pacific University to examine the relationship between faith and work. The researchers hope to gain an understanding of how people from diverse workplaces and socio-economic backgrounds integrate religious views and their work.
The comprehensive study will focus on U.S. workers and will comprise a broad-based national, random-sample survey of approximately 12,000 people from multiple religious traditions and no religious tradition. Research will explore faith at work as well as religious discrimination. It will include focus groups with both professional and working-class participants and as many as 200 in-depth, follow-up interviews.
After the survey, the project will examine the unique challenges that Christians (including  moderate, conservative and liberal Protestants and Catholics) face in their workplaces and careers; how their faith does or does not address such challenges; and the best ways clergy and others may attend to these challenges.
“For many, work is the single largest time commitment in life,” said Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice and the study’s principal investigator. “And for many, faith and faith community are the most meaningful commitments in life. Understanding how people integrate these two facets of life is the core purpose of this research.”
Ecklund, who is also the director of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, will collaborate with Denise Daniels, a professor of management in the School of Business, Government and Economics at Seattle Pacific University.
“Our goal is that detailed data collection and carefully designed outreach efforts will put easy-to-understand data into the hands of as many U.S. clergy as possible and create networks of clergy who are trained to meet the spiritual needs of working men and women from various demographic groups, across multiple ...

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