Understanding the nuances

The Orthodox Union released a study this week that explores the experiences of people who leave Orthodoxy.

Dr. Moshe Krakowski, who directs doctoral studies at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education, conducted the study with the OU’s Center for Communal Research, which aims to help the OU and communal leaders better understand and serve the Jewish community.

The first phase of the two-part study consists of the recently released results from a qualitative analysis of 29 in-depth interviews. “Qualitative research is really concerned with depth and not breadth,” Dr. Rachel Ginsberg of Livingston, CCR’s principal researcher, said. “We want to understand how people are making meaning of their experiences in their lives. It’s not something you can get from a survey because when you come to a survey, you’re asking them the questions, whereas when we come to an interview, we’re giving our participants the space to express to us the ways in which they’re making meaning of their life experiences.

“Twenty-nine people is actually a large sample for a qualitative study in the sense that each of the semi-structured interviews was well over an hour, so you can imagine how much depth we were able to really get into in terms of understanding of people’s experiences and the way they’re making meaning of it, and how wide of an experience we captured in terms of all the different facets of the people’s lives and what they feel is meaningful to their story and their trajectory.

“We’re not looking for numbers,” Dr. Ginsberg continued. The goal of the qualitative phase of a mixed-method study like this is not to ascertain how prevalent a particular type of experience is. “In our report we’ll reference a percentage of participants but it’s just to say that this came up over and over again, so we think there’s something about the experience, that this is part of some people’s experience. It was really about understanding the different types of experiences people are having. Then we’re going to take all of this learning and understanding and this deep probing that we did and create a survey that asks about these specific things.”

The second phase will be quantiati—ve and include the survey. Researchers hope to have between 2,000 and 3,000 participants in that phase.

The 29 first-phase interviewees — 15 women and 14 men, from 18 to 43 years old – had modern Orthodox, yeshivish, Chabad, and chasidic backgrounds, and live in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

The study team used a “snowball approach” to recruit the participants. “We found individuals with backgrounds from across the spectrum of Orthodoxy,” mostly through personal contacts, Dr. Ginsberg said. “We would make contact with one person, ask them for a few recommendations, and follow up with one or two of the people they recommended. But we did not want to go too far down what we call a seed, because we really wanted to hear from a wide variety of people, experiences, and affiliations.”

How did the study team define leaving? “I’m hesitant to define it,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “I think it means different things to different people. We were looking for people who would say for themselves they have left the Orthodox community. That was the criteria. If you view yourself as no longer part of the Orthodox community, that was enough of a criteria for us to say we want to hear what happened, what’s your story, what were your experiences.

“So it’s not about behaviors, it’s not about keeping kosher, let’s say, or Shabbos. It was more about how people told their stories to us, and where they situated themselves personally, as opposed to any exterior kind of criteria that we were imposing on them.”

Results indicated that decisions to leave tend to be complicated. “We found that it was usually not just one factor,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “It was a combination of several different factors. People may not have attributed their movement to those factors, they may have been focused, let’s say, on theological questions, but in their telling of their story, this factor pops in and this factor pops in, and this factor is revealed, and so we see usually it’s not just one experience or understanding that causes somebody to leave. People are too multi-dimensional for that. The human condition is too complex for that.”

One factor that came up often was a feeling of not quite belonging, of feeling different, Dr. Ginsberg said. Close to 90% of the interviewees felt that they did not belong in some way; they felt socially different than their peers, or not Orthodox enough, or not wealthy enough.

Another common factor was religious misalignment between different parts of participants’ lives. All 29 participants described serious misalignment while growing up; examples included parents who had different levels of religiosity, parents who experienced a quick change in religious observance, and families that were either more or less religious than their schools or communities. Participants described having to shift their religious identity depending on the context, or else stand out as radically different.

The results of this phase of the study will be used to inform the next one. “The qualitative interviews told us what are the pieces and the mechanisms that are at play,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “This is about understanding the different types of experiences that factor into this process. Anything of the factors on this list, everybody we survey could have it, or 3% of the people could have it, but we believe these are the things that are going to come up in people’s stories.

“The quantitative piece of the study will tell us about percentages,” about how common any of the factors are, “what’s happening the most, what’s happening the least,” Dr. Ginsberg continued. “Percentage-wise, I can’t tell you now if more people are experiencing misalignment or more people experience a lack of belonging. The quantitative survey will also tell us how large a problem this actually is, how many people are leaving.”

The study team is in the process of creating a representative sample for the second phase.

“We want to be able to generalize our findings to the whole Orthodox community,” Dr. Ginsberg said. The researchers built a database of the approximately 1,200 Orthodox elementary schools in the United States — the schools range from modern Orthodox to chasidic — and selected 134 of them to create a representative sample based on demographics.

They plan to survey everyone who graduated from one of the schools in the sample over a specified 15-year period. “We’re using graduates of eighth grade as a proxy for a census, because we can assume that if you attended an Orthodox elementary school, the likelihood is you were raised Orthodox,” she said.

This phase of the study will not be limited to people who have left the Orthodox community. “We want to speak to everybody who was raised Orthodox and see where they are now,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “We’re going to be speaking to people who are Orthodox, who continue to be Orthodox, who are raising Orthodox families, to those who have moved to different streams of Orthodoxy, and to those who have left the Orthodox community.

“We want to understand the complete landscape – what is happening in people’s religious trajectories, what makes people move, what makes people stay, and what makes people move in which direction. We want to understand it all. That’s why we’re reaching out to everybody — not just those who have left — because we want to understand the full landscape and picture of this phenomenon.”

The goal of the study is to address attrition and increase retention, to help communal leaders and policy makers take action in service of that goal, Dr. Ginsberg said. “It’s part of the conversation of Jewish continuity. How do we ensure Jewish continuity at the highest levels in our community?” She sees the study as the first step in a broader communal conversation about how to use the data to develop programs and support to ensure Orthodox continuity and a thriving Jewish future.

“The communal-facing work that the CCR does at the OU is about highlighting some of the struggles that people are engaging with, and trying to help leaders, and trying to help communities, understand what is going on in people’s lives,” Dr. Ginsberg continued. “It’s like holding up a communal mirror.” Those leaders and communities then are in a better position to consider how they can help.

“One important finding that came to light is how connected those who have left Orthodoxy still are to the Orthodox community,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “I think understanding that can really impact the conversation, the ways we talk about this phenomenon, and the way we look at inclusion.

“I think in general people look at this phenomenon of leaving as binary – you’re either in or you’re out – and I think what we learned here is that’s really not the case. People maintain their connection. It remains part of their identity. There’s something called religious residue that really keeps people connected. It’s really an important part of the conversation that I don’t think was understood before this.

“It’s not in or out. It’s not black or white. We’re talking about human beings, and we need to understand that there’s nuance here.”