Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

CHAPTER FIVE
ANALYSIS OF THE SURVEY DATA
We now turn to the surveys which give a picture of the
teaching of preaching in Great Britain today. This chapter
compares a variety of answers to several key survey
questions. 1 It analyzes the collected information from
several perspectives.
I. Overall Survey Response
The chapter begins by offering a composite summary=1
of all answers to these key questions. This summary serves
two purposes. First, it introduces the survey questions and
gives opportunity for preliminary comment both on the
questions themselves and general response to them. Second,
the overall response to a question serves as one point of
comparison with the responses of various subgroups within
the total set. (Appendix three's summary of the composite
responses simplifies this comparison.)
One question (no. 8 on the survey) asked the lecturers
to rank. in order of importance, six potential goals in
teaching preaching. The lecturers placed "1" beside the
goal they consider most important, "2" beside the next most
important, and so on down to "6" beside the least important.
The coals offered on the survey parallel the six aspects of
preaching discussed in chapters two and three: content,
setting, purpose, communication factors, source, and the
preacher himself.
The average of all responses to each component of this