Does Sleep Get Me Close to God?

What better way to celebrate 200 episodes of great educational podcasting than to look to the future of the social scientific study of religion with Prof. Bradley Wright, associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut!  Prof. Wright is engaged in new project called SoulPulse (link here) that harnesses the growing popularity of social media and cellular technology to study the daily spirituality of individual folks like you.  Even the grade school kids we have in studio for a field trip agree that SoulPulse represents the hottest trend in social scientific research methods.

Prof. Wright begins the podcast by discussing what SoulPulse is — a two week survey that is conducted twice daily at random intervals designed to probe a person’s spiritual experiences in relation to a set of other variables (e.g., amount of sleep, work stress, etc.).  Following an initial online screening questionnaire that takes about 10 minutes to complete, participants in this study are asked to fill out two surveys per day that take roughly 2-3 minutes to complete.  The surveys can be conducted on a cell phone or at a computer and attempt to capture what the research subject is experiencing and feeling at the moment.