Barna Group, which specializes in public opinion research and cultural analysis, and Gloo, a technology and data analytics company, joined forces to help church leaders assess the well-being of congregants and the health of churches. The result is Barna ChurchPulse. 

We thought you might want to know how we developed the ChurchPulse Flourishing assessment. It’s a little on the technical side, but here’s a brief tour of the inputs, phases and analytical processes that went into its creation.

Flourishing People To develop a measure of human flourishing that is both reliable from a research standpoint and brief enough to be usable in a church setting, we had our work cut out for us. We started with four dimensions—relationships, purpose / vocation, finances and physical / mental health—using assessment items developed and validated by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

We included a fifth dimension, faith, not only because it is central to pastoral concerns but also because many researchers (including those at Harvard) have identified involvement in a faith community as a pathway to flourishing. In order to understand how best to measure flourishing faith, our researchers incorporated assessment items from a number of sources, including the Christian Life Profile (Frazee, 2005), the REVEAL survey and Barna’s sizable database of questions we’ve tested in the past 35-plus years.

In the end, more than 50 items related to the five dimensions were included in a nationally representative survey of 1,693 U.S. adults, including 1,083 who regularly attend a Christian church. Once the data came in, researchers then had to answer this: If we could only use two items for each dimension, which would they be? To make that determination, they used analytical tools like confirmatory factor analysis and ordinal and logistic regression to identify which items for each dimension are the strongest fit for churchgoers and the degree to which they correlate with positive outcomes: joyfulness and contentment, hopefulness about the future and overall satisfaction with life. The final items in the Flourishing assessment are: