Abstract:
Many young women in the Catholic Church are discerning whether they are called to live in a religious order of nuns or sisters. To make this decision, these Catholic women, normally between the ages of 18 and 25, are likely to use Internet resources to learn more about orders in which they are interested and decide if they would like to learn more about them (either in person or through other resources). The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of different religious orders' websites in terms of how well they present their vocational resources to young women doing this kind of research. The effectiveness of the websites has been determined by performing content analyses on what information is found in the websites and how effectively the information is presented. Through a series of operationalized questions, this study finds that, while some orders have effective online resources, many orders do not because they have failed to streamline the information presented and the way the website is formatted.
