PLEASE READ ALL DIRECTIONS BEFORE CONTINUING.

We are conducting a research project concerning the processes of forced termination among clergy.  We need a group of ministry couples who have experienced forced termination to participate in the study.   

We understand that forced termination is a negative experience and being asked to remember such a negative event may be troubling to you.  We also understand that the survey is long and comprehensive.  You are not required to finish the survey or to answer all the questions.  However, your full participation in the project will help us better understand forced termination and its effects on the clergy family and may help us understand how clergy who experience forced termination can be helped.     

The purpose of this project is to explore what clergy couples experience during forced termination.  In the survey, there are questions about how you feel about your termination experience.  Because we hope to understand how forced termination affects ministry families we also ask quite a few questions about any health problems, anxiety or burnout you may have experienced, as well as any negative actions or consequences you may have experienced and your perception of their impact.  We also have included measures that ask you about any losses you may have encountered as a result of your termination.  Our review of the literature has revealed that some clergy may experience some health problems and some family problems as a result of being forced terminated.  Our questions are an attempt to uncover what problems clergy couples are really experiencing.       

There are about 150 questions in the survey. It will take you about 35 minutes to finish it. It is best if you complete the survey in one sitting. If you qualify, a researcher will contact you or your spouse about setting up an interview. 

All the information provided will be confidential and will be used only for statistical analyses and interpretation.  Doing these surveys is completely up to you. No one can force you to do them and you won't lose anything if you don't do them.

We are including one open-ended question at the end of the survey where we would like to hear from you; please tell us about your reaction to the survey for example, were there any items you felt were not important or were not related to your experience with forced termination, please list them.  If you chose not to answer questions or question sets, please tell us why.  We want to know if these are good question to include in any future research. 

Thank you in advance for taking the time to participate in our survey. We value your feedback. This project has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of Texas Tech University.