Personal Sovereignty
Personal Sovereignty is an exploratory project examining childhood formation, freedom of thought, coercion, memory and the development of personal sovereignty.
The project asks not whether a religion or belief system is true or false, but what choices, fears, obligations and alternatives were available to a child while their understanding of the world was being formed.
The questionnaires are reflective tools. They are not diagnostic instruments.
They also provide a way for people to record how their understanding of their own childhood experiences develops or changes over time.
The Questionnaires
The questionnaire series approaches childhood formation through a set of related subjects rather than attempting to reduce a person's history to a single score or a fixed number of questions.
Each subject uses only the number of questions needed to cover its distinct ideas. One questionnaire may therefore be shorter or longer than another. The aim is to avoid padding a subject merely to reach an arbitrary question count.
The current thematic series examines religious threat, sacrifice, authority and obedience, thought and doubt, choice and consent, sin and blame, and belonging and exclusion.
The series currently contains 9 registered questionnaires. These form the current thematic childhood-formation set.
Light and Full responses
Each questionnaire can be completed as either a Light response or a Full response.
A Light response records the structured answer and age or first-awareness information.
A Full response preserves the same structured information while also providing space to record what the person understood at the time, what they understand now, and anything else they want to preserve.
A response does not need to be completed in one sitting. Returning later to add memories, context or further understanding can help build a fuller record and can enrich the Personal Story produced from it.
A History of Your Own Answers
A later answer does not simply replace an earlier answer.
Our understanding of childhood experience can change. A person may remember something differently, acquire new information, recognise the significance of an earlier experience, or simply find better words for something that was previously difficult to describe.
Personal Sovereignty can preserve separate dated versions showing:
• what I answered;
• when I answered it;
• my age or first awareness;
• what I understood then;
• what I understand now; and
• how my response or understanding developed over time.
The purpose is not to declare that the latest answer is the only correct answer.
Instead, the history preserves how a person's accessible understanding of their own experience developed over time.
Saved responses can be reviewed, exported and removed by the respondent.
My Personal Story
Saved questionnaire responses can also be brought together into My Personal Story.
The Personal Story is different from the question-by-question response report. It draws together related answers, age information and written reflections into a more readable narrative.
Light responses provide structured material for the story. Full responses can provide considerably more detail because the story can also draw upon the person's own reflections about what they understood then and what they understand now.
As more questionnaires are completed, the story can develop alongside the person's record.
The story generator does not determine why an experience occurred, establish what effects it caused, or make a diagnosis. The saved questionnaire responses remain the underlying source record.
Development, Privacy and Personal Control
Personal Sovereignty remains under active development, but permanent response history is now functioning.
While a questionnaire is being completed, an unfinished draft can be protected in the browser on that device. This helps prevent writing from being lost if the person is interrupted or a browser or server session expires.
The questionnaire pages also use a secure session keep-alive while they remain open, reducing the chance that a long period of writing will end with an expired form-verification session.
A permanent response is created only when the respondent explicitly chooses to save it.
Saved Personal Sovereignty response records are kept in private server storage outside the publicly accessible website. The response system uses a random browser identifier rather than requiring a person's name or email address as part of the saved questionnaire record.
A person can review their saved history, export copies for their own use, delete individual saved responses, delete a questionnaire history, or begin again with a fresh response history.
Private questionnaire responses are not automatically treated as research material or made public.
Personal control of the record — including what is retained, exported, shared or removed — is a central part of the Personal Sovereignty project.
