Through the tools of public teaching, academic research findings are translated into forms that reach a wider audience. For example, The Polis Center is producing a second multi-part video series on religion and culture, has published books of photography and essays by local writers, and has sponsored workshops and conferences dealing with religion in public life. One approach by the Center has been to find new ways of translating findings for presentation to public groups by using multimedia, brief newsletters, and web features. Activities have been hosted in congregations, schools, libraries, and other non-university settings to make them more inviting. Other experiments, not all successful, have included using community members or even high school students to help collect data in local neighborhoods.
Academic training seems still to correlate with reliable results.
Selected quantitative data will be integrated into the SAVI database. These data are being prepared for scholarly use, through an application and approval process, and some limited public use under the Federal Research Guidelines for Human Subjects. It's time for sociologists of religion to step up to the plate. A few studies have already contributed to our base of knowledge. Mark Chaves has given us solid numbers on what congregations are doing and how willing they would be to take government money.