Computer-Aided Qualitative Research Europe

7 & 8 Oct 2010, Lisbon

For more information about our events, please visit:

http://www.merlien.org

A. Crescentini and G.A.Veltri

Computer-Aided Qualitative Research; 7-8 October 2010, Lisboa (Portugal).

Data triangulation on

newspapers articles

using different software

Overview

� Background � Theoretical background

� Triangulation

� Current Research

� Methodological notes � Research questions

� Sample

� Analytical steps

� Main results � Articles body analysis

� Articles headline analysis

� Data triangulation

� Final considerations and further steps

Theoretical Background

� Social Representations Theory (Moscovici, 1988). Focus on the use metaphors and clusters of meanings to determine the core of representations present in the mass media.

� Researchers in this area are focused on the idea that in the public sphere there are competing definitions, in what is a complex game played for control of semantics in the public sphere (Gaskell et al., 1998). � Anchoring and Objectification (Moscovici, 1988)

� Similarly, there is the notion of “mediascapes” (Van Loon, 2002), the symbolic environment in which a technology is debated.

Qualitative research: two words on validity

Current research

� Studies on nanotechnology and the mass media have increased in the past few years due to the increasing hype that is surrounding this scientific domain.

� Research on nanotechnology’s mediascapes have focused initially on UK and US, but now other countries are under scrutiny (see Kjølberg, 2009; Kjærgaard, 2010) . In Spain, to our knowledge, nothing similar exists at the moment.

� In addition, most studies focused mainly on risk/benefits analytical frame within the media analysis.

Research questions

� How nanotechnology has been anchored in the Spanish National Press?

� How the nanotechology risk discourse has been anchored?

Methodological notes

� 646 articles (1997 to 2010) from three main spanish newspapers:

� El Mundo – 432,204 daily copies on average, (moderate)

� El Pais – 330,634 daily copies on average, (left-leaning)

� ABC – 240,225 daily copies on average, (right-leaning)

� 392.666 words, 32.477 lemmas

� From Lexis - Nexis database (www.lexisnexis.com)

� Sampling criteria: presence several keywords such as ‘nanotecnologia’, ‘nanosciencia’, ‘nanoparticulas’, ‘nanostructura’ and ‘manipulación atómica’, ‘ingeniería atómica’.

Analysis T-Lab 7 – atlas.ti 6.1

� Articles were pre-processed by human coding: tagging and establishing main variables (newspaper, year, etc.)

� We explored his texts using different kinds of tools: � Co-occurrence analysis and automatic thematic analysis

� Comparative analysis

� Automatic thematic analysis of EC as mean to unravel core packets of meanings in the coverage of nanotechnology in Spanish Press.

� Cluster analysis of themes and their longitudinal evolution

� Headline were analyzed to find main categories

� Three main codes have been applied to identify the attitude of newspapers

Understanding

Longitudinal analysis of themes

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Risk Discourse Clusters

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Risk discourse longitudinal evolution

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Risk discourse by newspapers

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Conclusions � Quantitative analysis of text

data particularly important for the longitudinal dimension. � Overview of the overall

coverage

� Overview of a given newspaper coverage

� Not limited to the risk/benefit analytical frame

� Complementary to qualitative coding or a reliability tool to compare human thematic coding and automatic one

� Qualitative analysis helps in giving sense to the information

� Problem of the attitude

� Risk of hyper analysis

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Thank you!

alberto.crescentini@supsi.ch

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Computer-Aided Qualitative Research Europe

7 & 8 Oct 2010, Lisbon

For more information about our events, please visit:

http://www.merlien.org