Mapping Global Youth and Religion. Big Data As Lens to Envision a Sustainable Development Future

Abstract

Having fun and buying goods. For the young people of the world between 18 and 25, these are their main concerns on social media, as demonstrated by this study, which aims to identify the interests of global youth and also to unveil religion’s place in this generation (Lim and Parker, 2020; Tilleczek and Campbell, 2019). The role of values and education among them (Zamora-Polo et al., 2020), and the influencers and social leaders they follow are also included among the results of this research, which also plans to discern their potential alignment with the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals. For this purpose, more than 540 million Facebook and Instagram profiles have been analyzed using social listening (Couldry, 2006) through a Big Data based methodology. The results are new values (Kimball, 2019) and new ways to envisage religion, and depict an evolving landscape with change, culture and consumption pointing the way. Keywords: big data, religion, youth, social media, sustainable development goals.