Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage, British General Election, 2001

<P>Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.</P>&nbsp;<br>SN 4623 contains the content analysis of campaign newspaper coverage component of the 2001 BES. The aim of the project was to conduct a high-level content analysis of the press coverage of the 2001 election campaign, resulting in the creation of a campaign dataset that will enable movements in opinion during the campaign to be related to press coverage of the campaign. A simplified version of the 1997 Scammel/Semetko coding schema was devised for this purpose. Articles relating to the election campaign were identified from eight daily newspapers for the election campaign period. Articles were manually coded according to the set coding frame and coding was examined after completion to ensure consistent results. As an addition to the datasets of coded articles, corresponding datasets of article headlines were compiled to facilitate further research.<br>
<br><br><B>Main Topics</B>:<BR><br>Articles relating to the election campaign were identified from eight daily newspapers (Monday-Friday): &lt;i&gt;The Guardian&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Times&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Daily Telegraph&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Independent&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Sun&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Mirror&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;The Daily Mail&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;The Express&lt;/i&gt;. This included articles from within the home news pages of the newspapers and in addition, leaders, editorial and comment articles referring to the election campaign. No photographs, paid-for campaign advertisements, diary columns or articles of less than 50 words (with the exception of front page articles) were included. Campaign articles from other pages or separate sections to the main newspapers were not included - for example, international, finance, sports and letters pages, &lt;i&gt;The Guardian&lt;/i&gt;'s 'G2' section, etc. The exceptions to this were leaders, editorial and comment articles from &lt;i&gt;The Independent&lt;/i&gt; which all appear in the supplementary 'Review' section.<br>
Five files are available:<br>
file 1: a dataset of 1440 campaign articles content-coded using the coding schema;<br>
file 2: a dataset of 269 non-campaign articles partially content-coded using the coding schema;<br>
file 3: a dataset of 200 front-page campaign headlines;<br>
file 4: a dataset of 269 front-page non-campaign headlines;<br>
file 5: a dataset of 1240 campaign headlines from a sample taken from the main section of newspapers.<br>
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Standard Measures<br>
A simplified version of the 1997 Scammel/Semetko coding frame was used. Please see documentation for further details.