Preliminary Comments on Survey

I am not an expert on statistics and analysis, despite the fact that this past summer I had to translate a highly technical statistical paper. Anyway, some of the current results of the industry-wide Survey on Bible Software are so clear and telling, that simply by looking at the figures and percentages you get a very good idea about the prevailing situation.

After all these years I've always had the feeling that Bible software was not used very extensively by women. Sure enough, out of a total of 2,146 respondents (at the time of writing), 1,927 were men (that's 89.8%), and only 223 women. But contrary to my expectations, 50.4% of the respondents were aged 46 or older. In fact, the most represented age range is 46-55, with 30%.

The typical Bible software user that emerges from these provisional results is a middle-aged male, pastor of a church (or Bible study leader) with a College or Master's degree, who has formally studied Greek and/or Hebrew, and likes books. This prototype user runs Windows XP on a desktop computer, though probably owns a laptop, and has a Cable modem or DSL Internet connection. Now, does that sound like you?

To be continued...