Research Project Overview

Over a 21-month span from August 2022 to April 2024, Baylor University engaged in data collection efforts with twelve centers for Christian thought. The purpose of this relationship was to conduct a two-year longitudinal study examining the unique affordances of meta-identity moral communities for virtue formation. The research project titled “The Role of Meta-Identity in Developing Moral Communities Within Higher Education” was generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). Specifically, the project aimed to address the following questions:

1. What are the affordances of meta-identity moral communities for virtue formation, and can we identify communities of practice that harness the affordances well?
2. How do centers for Christian thought influence moral identity and virtue development?
3. How do centers for Christian thought offer students’ thick’ religious and academic communities that aid the development of intellectual, moral, civic, and performative virtues?
4. Using what we learn from this study, how can we build meta-identity moral communities of practice within secular university settings that effectively form virtue?

More information about the project and related publications can be found on the BRIGHTS website.

Centers for Christian Thought

This project was specifically interested in the role of para-academic institutions that we collectively/ecumenically referred to as centers for Christian thought (CCT). Protestant and ecumenical versions of these centers often refer to themselves as Christian study centers (CSC); whereas Catholic versions of these centers were more likely to refer to themselves as institutes for Catholic thought. The Consortium of Christian Study Centers^[1] states that “Christian Study Centers are communities of students and scholars animated by the ancient ideal of faith seeking understanding. Located adjacent to colleges and universities, study centers support and complement their host institutions’ mission to discover and disseminate knowledge by convening conversations that address the big questions of life—questions of meaning, purpose, and value. In addition to public lectures, many study centers offer intimate conversations and comfortable hospitality in their own facilities.” For more information about these Centers, see Cockle et al., 2024).

The research study included 12 CCTs. It examined five core CCTs that participated in our study from the very beginning—three ecumenical and two Catholic—and five additional CCTs that joined our efforts over time—five ecumenical and two Catholic. A list of all centers and institutes that participated in the research study is provided as an appendix. 

Center Involvement

Centers participated in a community of practice (COP) that met regularly over Zoom in the Spring and Fall semesters. The first series focused on center mapping, and the subsequent series focused on virtue development. Centers also participated in annual in-person meetings. Finally, Centers also assisted the research team in recruiting for the longitudinal study.  

Focus of this Report

This report summarizes CCT results from the four waves of survey data collection. The results are segmented into the following sections:

• Demographics of Study Participants
• Program Engagement
• Religiousness & Spirituality
• Virtues

How to Use This Information

The report provides four snapshots of what occurred at CCTs from Fall 2022 to Spring 2024. The comparative data can be used in evaluative thinking to highlight potential areas for improvement, possible actions, and realistic targets for future evaluations. The data can also be used to communicate to key stakeholders why actions are needed.

Evaluators recommend first reading the report and understanding it for yourself. Consider key contextual information that might help with a correct interpretation of the data. Remember that the data presented here is from the 12 CCTs that participated in the longitudinal study. Consider how similar or different these findings may be for your specific organization. After you feel like you have a good understanding of the data, then discuss your results with your key stakeholders (upper leadership, management, board of directors). The purpose of these conversations can be to identify strengths and any areas to investigate further or improve. Data like this can provide a lot of information and possible next steps, but it is highly recommended that you prioritize responding to only one or two areas. After identifying these areas, develop a plan for improvement and continuously evaluate this area until you reach your goal.

Continued Assessment

We highly recommend that centers and institutes assess virtues at regular intervals. The free toolkit, Cultivating Character: A Toolkit for Assessing Virtues in College Students, provides you with worksheets, surveys, scripts, and guides for continuing assessment on your own.

Specifically, we recommend continuing to assess your virtue profile using the organization monitoring techniques and the virtue index (more details can be found in the toolkit). The virtue index is a 16-item survey that assesses all the virtues measured in the research study. We recommend using this tool every semester or at least once a year to keep a pulse on your organization’s virtue profile. The virtue index is a new tool we created from this project. Unfortunately, this means the data in this report will not be comparable with the data collected with that tool. However, this simple tool (that takes no more than 5 minutes to complete) can help you quickly determine virtue strengths and weaknesses.

If there are specific virtues that you want to focus on, we recommend identifying strategies or programs that may cultivate these virtues^[2]. When targeting specific virtues within programs, it will be best to develop a theory of change and use the appropriate program evaluation techniques, along with the full virtues scales found in the toolkit.  The full virtue scales are the same measurements used to collect data for this report.

Finally, this report focused on assessing students’ virtues. In future iterations of assessment, you may also want to consider assessing staff virtues. Findings may highlight the need for specific staff training or practices that could cultivate staff formation.

Making Sense of the Data

If you are unfamiliar with looking at a lot of data, we recommend reading this section. In this report, the most common statistic used is the mean. The mean is the arithmetic average of a specific group. For example, if a CCT sample has a mean score of 3.35, and the College sample has a mean score of 2.97, then we interpret this as: On average, participants in the study from the CCT sample scored 3.35; and, on average, participants in the College sample scored 2.97. We can infer from these scores that, on average, participants at the CCTs scored higher than all participants from the College sample. In the demographics section below, we provide more information to help you understand the size and makeup of each sample discussed in this report (i.e., CCT and College).

Throughout this report, we provide only one score (the mean) to represent an entire sample. However, the individuals who make up this sample may have very different scores and journeys across the four waves of data collection. The figure below, called a spaghetti plot, can help us understand this.  Each line in this figure represents a randomly selected person and their intellectual humility scores at the four timepoints. The red dotted line represents the mean (i.e., the average).

Note: In this figure, higher scores represent more of the virtue, intellectual humility.

Using the data visualization, we are able to see that many individuals either are above or below the mean (i.e., they scored differently than the mean score). We can also see that many of them follow the average trend line (i.e., the red dotted line). However, this figure allows us to identify that some individuals have very different paths. For instance, notice the lime green line, whose intellectual humility scores fluctuated greatly throughout time. Also, see the gold and green lines at the top; these individuals scored slightly higher than average at Time 1, then dropped and rose again, with gold and green settled back near where they began. Compare this to the teal line that started high, dropped for two waves, and then ended higher than where they started. These lines share each person’s journey, and we can clearly see from this figure that everyone’s virtue trajectory is different.

Yet, in reports like this one, we use means to describe the trajectory of a group. Means are very important because they allow us to make meaning of a lot of data for a group; they can help us set goals for our organizations and inform strategic planning efforts. Nevertheless, using the means to describe the data also flattens the story and doesn’t allow you to see individual journeys.  In small samples, we can only use simple statistics like means to make sense of the data. However, with large data samples, we can use more sophisticated statistics to tell more nuanced stories. The recruitment efforts from the 12 participating centers/institutes for this study made it possible for us to have a large sample of 2,791 college students. We will publish more nuanced findings in journal articles, which you can find on the BRIGHTS website.

Now that we have completed all the background information, it is finally time to look at the data!