Eighth-Day Freedom

Our survey is now live in Brazil, translated into Portuguese

Our survey is now live in Brazil, translated into Portuguese

 

Survey translated into Portuguese
Our research team is excited to announce that our survey has been cloned and translated into Portuguese. This major contribution to our research effort was made possible through the work of André Kanasiro, editor and founding member of Zelota magazine. Thanks are due to senior staff at Spectrum Magazine¹ for brokering this connection.

Here is part of the conversation I had with André as we worked on the translation:

Tom: Why you wanted to get the survey translated and live in Portuguese?

André: I saw the news on the survey as told by Spectrum Magazine, and then I just knew we had to bring it to Brazil. Adventism in Brazil has massive evasion numbers (approximately 1.5 million people left the church from 2011 to 2020, while 2.2 million joined), and has a highly centralized, hierarchical leadership who is increasingly occupying administrative positions in the General Conference.

Tom: How you will reach out to ex-SDA Brazilians -and other Portuguese speakers globally- who you think may be interested in completing the survey?

André: We will reach out to Brazilian and Portuguese speakers through Zelota magazine, an independent Adventist journal we founded two years ago. We will also contact other social media profiles that may be interested in sharing the survey with its public.

Tom: How you think the survey will be received Brazilians?

André: I think it may trigger passionate reactions from both sides: while many ex-Adventists and Adventists who do not agree with the church in everything are more than willing to speak up, many conservative members and leaders are deeply disturbed by new ways of bringing transparency and accountability to the church’s doorstep.

Here is the translation from the Instagram announcement:

If you are a former Adventist, believe in Adventist doctrines outside the institutional environment, or are part of the Adventist world without believing or practicing all Adventist beliefs, this survey was designed with the objective of getting to know more closely your profile and your life experience. It is part of a project led by a small teaching team at Elon University, in North Carolina, USA, which, in partnership with Zelota, intends to disseminate the questionnaire in Brazil and Latin America.

The goal is to discover, from former Seventh-day Adventists, what led people to leave the Adventist movement, what the experience of leaving was like, and what life has been like since they left. There is also an interest in capturing responses from those who no longer believe or practice but remain part of the Adventist system, whether within the formal structure or simply as part of the community of Adventist believers. The plan is to leave the survey open for about three months, in order to capture responses from as many former Adventists as possible.

The research will be available until June 1, 2023. Preliminary results will be published, over time, on the project blog (indicated on the research website), and later transformed into a set of scientific articles. Other analyzes and comments can be found in Zelota magazine and on the websites associated with the project.

Link is in Bio!

Responses are coming in now … from across the globe
As of this writing the Portuguese version of the survey has been live less than 24 hours and already has 70 responses. The 100% completion rate is exceptional, the same as the English version. Respondents are averaging less that 31 minutes engaged with the survey.

The English version currently has 858 responses from all over the world. Though mostly from the United States and Canada, we have respondents from all regions of the world. This blog is being accessed from all of the locations indicated by this map.

The survey in both versions will remain live until 1 June 2023. Please encourage those who have not yet taken the survey to share their voices. Here is the link for the English version and here for the Portuguese version.

Thank you
Thanks to the staff at Spectrum Magazine, André at Zelota Magazine, and to the now over 900 respondents who have shared their stories and opinions on the survey thus far. Our journey processing all these rich data has just begun. In the short term, we will continue posting ‘data teasers” and comment, but in the long term we plan at least 2-3 academic articles and several public scholarship essays discussing the results. Please bookmark our EighthDayFreedom blog for information and updates.

If you have any comments or questions I can be reached at arcaro@elon.edu.

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¹The Research Team was interviewed by Jeremy Gray at Spectrum Magazine. You can listen to the podcast here.