In this study, I analyze the Twitter activity of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops. The first stage of building the dataset -- collecting basic information about the bishops, their dioceses, and their Twitter handles -- is complete.
Next steps include:
- Collecting details about the bishops' Twitter accounts:
- Date of account creation
- Number of followers
- Number of accounts followed
- Number of retweets
- Number of replies
- Date of most recent Tweet (as of date of data collection; this information will be most relevant for accounts that are no longer active)
- Gathering information about the counties included in each diocese or archdiocese:
- Counties included
- Population
- Voting patterns in recent elections (presidential and midterms)
- Collecting and analyzing the text of the bishops' Tweets