Global Surveys

The main purpose of this website is to provide current and former Witnesses all over the world an opportunity to voice their honest opinions on the Watchtower organization, and its teachings and practices.

Our first survey was conducted in 2011, and 1,118 individuals shared their opinions. Since then we have held an annual survey each year to garner the opinions of current and former Witnesses. These surveys have attracted in excess of 6,000 voters, and the voting patterns have been very revealing.

You are warmly invited to take part in our latest survey, which can be accessed by clicking on the “have your say” button in the top-left of our website. Alternatively, if you have questions about our survey, hopefully these will be answered below:

Who can vote in the survey?

Our survey is available to active JWs, inactive/faded JWs, disfellowshipped/disassociated JWs, and even non-JWs (since some are raised in JW families, but for whatever reason don’t end up getting baptized).

Isn’t the survey one-sided?

Our survey will inevitably reflect a more disenchanted overall tone toward Watchtower than if the roughly 8 million active JWs were asked to vote. But we don’t believe this negates the significance of the data gleaned from our survey, since even many active JWs (including elders) vote each year. For example in 2015, 1,022 active JWs voted, of whom 145 were serving elders. If nothing else, this proves that the Governing Body cannot boast the 100% loyalty of all who attend kingdom hall meetings, or engage in the preaching work. And we would have little means of knowing this for sure without the survey.

Will you respect my privacy?

Absolutely. Any personal information collected in our survey is kept in strictest confidence, and not shared with any third parties. Bear in mind, all of us at JWsurvey have been Jehovah’s Witnesses at some point ourselves (some of us still are!), so we understand the ramifications if information that might identify a doubting JW were to get in the wrong hands. We take privacy and confidentiality extremely seriously.

Do you send the results to the Governing Body?

We printed and bound the first ever survey results from the 2011 survey, and mailed these to the Governing Body in Brooklyn by recorded delivery, knowing full well they would not reply (and very likely not even look at them). Thereafter we took the decision to not waste any more money going to such lengths for what is essentially a token gesture. If the Governing Body were truly interested in knowing what thousands of our current and former Witness voters think, they can read the results online with ease.

Where can I find the survey results?

Because we are volunteers with jobs and lives outside our activism work, it usually takes a few months to analyse the data gleaned from the previous year’s survey, and present it in a consolidated form. An easy way to find the results PDF for a given year is to click on the “Global Surveys” tab on the main menu, and select the year you are interested in from the dropdown. Alternatively, you can go to the “Search JWsurvey” box (below the “Article Categories” in the sidebar) and type “[year] survey results.” The results you want should come up straight away.