4.2. Research Design and Methods
4.2.1. Content Analysis as a Research Technique
4.2.1.1. Population, Sample and Analytical Categories
For this study, a four-month period, January 1, 2004 to April 30, 2004, of the Sunday Times’ election news coverage was sampled to constitute the population for analysis.
This period arguably represents a period when electoral news coverage was highest, since it comprises the last four-months leading to the elections on April 27, 2004. The period also coincides with South Africa’s celebration of ten years of democracy, and ten years since the democratic government put in place measures to advance the position of women, including their increased participation in the political process and decision- making positions. At this time, 30% of all parliamentarians were women (Goetz and Hassim 2003). I was also assuming that the main frames governing the coverage of the elections were put in place and reinforced during this same period, thus providing a good opportunity for analysing how the Sunday Times represents women politicians.
The Sunday Times, an English-language newspaper owned by the Black consortium in control of Johnnic (Emdon 1998), is the largest national weekly and had the largest readership levels of 3,239,000 in 2004 (SAARF 2004). As explained in Chapter 2, this
paper also has the largest circulation, and further had the highest representation of women sources in 2002, though most of these were represented in non-news items (MISA/GL 2003). This paper, as such, is of great importance to the South African press landscape. I decided to focus on the print, and not the electronic, media because it was quite easy for me to access archived newspapers. Furthermore, due to practical constraints of cost and time, I decided to focus specifically on one newspaper title, the Sunday Times.
The basic ‘unit of analysis’ used in the study was the individual news item. A news item is defined here as any Sunday Times ‘news story’, ‘editorial’, ‘feature article’ or
‘letter to the editor’ of a political nature. For inclusion in the sample, only news items that met the following selection criteria and rules were sampled:
1. The news item made specific reference to the 2004 South African elections;
2. The news item had the 2004 elections as its main focus; and 3. The news item was locally originating, and not foreign.
Based on these qualifying criteria, the sampled material was then thematically analysed, to reveal patterns of gender of news actors or sources, amount of coverage, and reference to selected subject matters, among others. Theme analysis does not rely on the use of specific words as basic content elements, but relies upon the coder to recognise certain
‘themes’, ideas or subject matters in the text, and then to allocate these to predetermined categories (see Deacon et al. 1999:118). No standard list of things to be analysed in a content analysis exists. However, through preliminary readings of the Sunday Times, my specific interest in both the frequency and the manner of representation of women
politicians, and drawing on insights from cultural studies and discourse theory, several analytical categories were identified as useful. These were drawn from the following hypotheses or assumptions.
Firstly, women politicians were infrequently used as news actors/sources in the Sunday Times during the sampled period. Secondly, the representation of women politicians tended to highlight the women’s capability to hold public office, their family relations, and their physical and personal attributes. Finally, the Sunday Times overall represented women politicians in a manner that perpetuated their subordinate status. In view of these hypotheses, I coded the sampled news items for the following variables.
All news items were coded for the date of publication mainly to identify when a particular news item was carried, and an identification number, which helped to establish the total number of election news items carried by the Sunday Times during the four- month period, was assigned to each news item. Looking at the total number of news items, it was possible for me to calculate how many of them carried news about women politicians, and helped me estimate the occurrence of women politicians in the news. The location or placement of each news item in the publication was also coded. The location and placement of a news item says a lot about the meaning of the event and the news actors/sources accompanying the event. A news item that appears on the front page, as opposed to one that appears on subsequent pages, carries with it a certain level of prominence, which also assigns a certain level of credibility and importance to the news actor/source. In addition, news items that appear on odd-numbered pages are considered more important than those on even-numbered pages are, so are the news actors/sources.
The genre or type of news item was also coded. Although the differentiation of news genres into a ‘news story’, ‘editorial’, ‘feature article’, or ‘letter to the editor’ were used mainly as basic identifier categories for general classification and comparison of media output in this study, Hansen et al. (1998:107) outline how different media genres set different limits for what can be articulated by whom through what format and context.
The size of each news item in terms of column inches and word count was also coded.
Quantity is an important aspect of representation, as this determines how much media space is allocated for an actor/source to provide his or her own definition of reality.
During the analysis, I counted and recorded the number of news sources/actors presented in each news item. Key to this study is the issue of gender, an important aspect of media representations (Hansen et al. 1998). Consequently, I also noted the gender of the news actors/sources, which was useful for establishing the number of women and men the Sunday Times used as news actors/sources. For news items with more than one news actor, coding was done for the three most prominent actors in decreasing order of prominence starting with the most prominent actor. An actor was considered prominent if he or she featured prominently in terms of: 1) the size of the news item about him or her, and; (2) the position or placement of the news source in the story. This was done only for politicians, who are the focus of the study.
I then coded the politician’s gender, the number of words used to represent them, and the subject matters (explained below) mentioned in their representation. Word count was used to roughly estimate the space allocated to the politician, bearing in mind however that, space may be affected by the typography of the headline and the size of the
photograph accompanying the news item. Given the onerous task of estimating, say, the column centimetres the words in the body text occupy, and then adding that to the column centimetres of the headline and the photography, the latter two were used mainly to aid in determining whether the news actor or source was prominently figured or not.
Since headlines and photographs play an important role in aiding the reading of a news item, a news actor or source that was figured in either of the two or both was considered to have been more prominently figured than one who was figured only in the body text.
The gender, word count and subject matter variables were useful for showing the differential presence of women and men politicians in the Sunday Times. Social
constructionists are particularly interested in coding actors to see who successfully makes claims about and thus helps to construct social reality. The gender variable was valuable in examining the source-reporter relationships, the source-power and power in the public realm (Hansen et al. 1998). We know from the sociology of news for instance that, news values are used in the selection of news events and the actors/sources, using such variable as prominence and relevance of the source. By considering which news actors/sources were used frequently, I was able to speculate whether women or men politicians were given more importance.
The amount of space or coverage allocated to a news actor/source is also important in matters of representation. Coverage was determined by estimating the size of the news item by counting the number of words given to each source/actor. For news items that mentioned more than one source, the size of that particular news item counted for each politician. In my analysis, I also looked at the subject matters that were highlighted in the Sunday Times’ representation of political figures. Consequently, news items were coded for referring to the politician’s capability to hold a public office, family relations,
physical attributes and personality characteristics. By referring to certain subject areas, the Sunday Times brought certain ideological orientations to bear, as I shall explain later
during the qualitative analysis. The actual process of coding all these variables involved the use of coding schedules.