Meaning of Motherhood in Sermons
Summary
This pilot study focuses on the range of messages regarding gender, family, and parenthood that are conveyed through Christian sermons. We will 1) collect church sermon recordings from a systematically sampled set of churches located in a two county area of North Carolina; 2) use Temi, an online automated transcription service, to convert approximately 125 sermon recordings to text that will be checked and cleaned by research assistants; and 3) analyze the resulting textual data to identify variation across sermons in the cultural schema (i.e., road maps for how to live) legitimized in them. All sermons will come from Sunday, May 12, 2019, which is Mother's Day. We will use both qualitative content analysis and computerized textual analyses (such as topic modeling) of the full corpus, to uncover patterns in if and how gender, family, and motherhood schema are conveyed, paying close attention to variance by congregational characteristics (e.g., denomination) and features of the surrounding community (e.g., average education or rate of single motherhood). This study will provide evidence of the viability and value of collecting and analyzing sermon data on a larger scale for the study of religious culture in the U.S. It will also help us anticipate what might be the difficulties in scaling this approach up for future studies.