Women's Issues Policy Priority Content Analysis

The content was selected by visiting the government website that lists all United States Representatives of the 115th Congress. This webpage has a directory of each representative, her or his state, district, political party and contact information. By selecting the name of the congressman or congresswoman, the viewer is linked to the representative’s official webpage. Typically, each webpage will have a section that is listed as “issues” or “priorities.” This section of the website outlines priority political issues and the representative’s stance on that issue. It is from this list that the content was coded. These websites were selected because these issues are likely enduing beliefs of the representative for the foreseeable future. It is important to note that there is no limit on how many issues a representative may list on the webpage.
Overall, there were 437 representatives that were active (vacant seats were not included in this study but territorial delegates were). Additionally, there were six representatives that had no information regarding their issue stance on their page. These members were also excluded from the coding process, leaving a total of 431 coded websites. Of that total, 211 were Republican men, 24 were Republican women, 65 were Democrat women, and 131 were Democrat men. Between three coders, an interrater reliability analysis was used for rater consistency (κ = .813 (p < .001) (Cohen’s Kappa). The coder completed ten percent of the original data set.