Collaborative Research: Further Strengthening Qualitative Research Through Methodological Innovation and Integration: Media Coverage of Social Movements

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

To understand social movements and the politics of the disadvantaged one needs to understand the media coverage of social movement and political advocacy organizations. These organizations provide critical resources to seek social change, help construct political identities, and spur civic engagement. The attention of the mass news media is critical to these organizations. News coverage shows that these organizations are being treated as legitimate spokespersons and helps them influence public opinion and policy agendas. This project augments a previous collection of approximately one million articles published in the twentieth century in four national newspapers--the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. This project will capture data in all 18 newspapers available through ProQuest Historical Newspapers, including a wealth of regional and African-American newspapers, and will extend these data through the first 15 years of this century. The project will also gather more extensive information about the articles, coverage data on major interest groups, and organizational data on the advocacy and movement organizations in the sample. These data will be supplemented with television news and social media data. In addition to creating this valuable data set, the key merits of the project include the addressing of several research questions regarding the causes of the amount and quality of coverage of movements and their organizations. The project will also result in the training of graduate students and produce several scholarly articles that identify and explain movement coverage and its consequences, and a scholarly monograph. The project addresses several key empirical and "why" questions about these organizations? news coverage: Which organizations and allied movements have received the greatest newspaper and TV coverage? Which organizations have received the greatest attention in their movements? How has the coverage changed over time and across movements? Are coverage patterns similar across national, regional, and African-American newspapers? Do movements usually gain substantive coverage in articles in which they are mentioned? What accounts for extensive newspaper coverage of a movement and its activities? What accounts for extensive newspaper coverage for individual organizations within a movement? Are the patterns of coverage consistent with the main theories of social movements?resource mobilization, new social movement, grievance, and political process and political reform theories? How has the connection between newspaper coverage and movement activity changed with the decline of newspapers and the rise of the Internet and social media? Under which conditions do movement actors receive substantive news coverage? The project will address these questions by synthesizing negative binomial regression analyses on counts data and qualitative methods, notably fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analyses and comparative historical analyses. The analyses combine big-data gathering with qualitative coding of newspapers. Unlike most large-N work, the project can return to the original data, the newspaper articles, to refine hypotheses and build theory.