Youth for Christ's DC/LA Ministries contracted with the Link Institute to assess the effectiveness of the SuperConferences taking place in the summer of 1997. Presumably this data collection and analysis will be used in the design of a similar series of conferences hereafter, necessitating a relatively short window of opportunity for conducting this research project. Link Institute thus employed the following operational question to guide its research:

This report is organized hereafter with three main headings. First, the research procedure is outlined. While this may be important to some readers (it does, after all speak to the reliability of everything that follows), many will wish to skip this section and move right into the section describing the research results. This section, by far the largest amount of material in this report, is subdivided in the following ways for easy referral: baseline profile of students, adjusted baseline profile of students, major results contrasting time and place, depend on Jesus, be real, love others, share the gospel, get connected, and have courage. WARNING: This section is thick and laborious reading, but attempts to lay out the details of what the collected/analyzed data have to say about DC/LA '97. Particular pearls of insight may be found in this section that are not necessarily reported in the final section, labeled research conclusions. This section is intended to be a helpful launching place for discussions about future conferences.