Printable Version
The Project on Religion and Urban Culture (RUC) has developed four databases that researchers use to help them understand congregations in Indianapolis. The RUC Access Database contains over 2000 pieces of interview and survey information from a third of the 1,200 congregations in the city. Applications to use this data for research purposes may be made directly to The Polis Center.

To permit analysis of statistical information based on the collected congregation census data, fields were extracted from the Access database and entered into SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The SPSS Database contains 100 variables for use in analysis of univariate descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis for just over 400 Indianapolis area congregations.

There are also rich ethnographic descriptions of congregational programs and activities, that have been created as part of the dataset in NUD*IST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Search and Theorizing). NUD*IST is a qualitative data analysis program that allows us to describe and compare similarities and differences between congregations by coding the textual data collected during field observations. For instance, we can assess from the textual interview data and descriptions whether a program or church activity that is designed to be used by congregation members or community folks. We can also assess whether the motivation for developing a program is based on the church�s spiritual orientation or a sense of community obligation. NUD*IST allows us to assign codes or attributes to the textual data as we come to understand highly complex concepts that cannot be easily captured through use of a close-ended survey. While NUD*IST can only used only in house, some of the coding assigned to congregations during textual analysis of data may eventually be added as a new variable in one of the other datasets we use.

The Historical Congregations Database lists historical and contemporary location, denomination, and membership information on Indianapolis congregations. This database is useful in understanding the mergers, splits, and geographic movement of congregations in the city over the last 70 years. The design of this data set allows us to connect the information on congregations to The Polis Center�s Geographic Information System and show changes in location and movement of particular churches through time, and, in some cases where we have data, the changing pattern of residential location of a church�s membership at varying intervals.