[Air-L] Constructed Week Sampling Online News

[Patricia Rossini]

Hi all,

I’m a Ph.D student in Brazil and I study political discussion around political news across multiple venues online. 
I recently came across a study that used constructed week sampling to analyze political discussion online in two venues WSJ website and facebook page (Rowe, 2015). Which is similar to what I want to do.

I was wondering if anyone has tips or texts on this method for sampling online news, as well as the advantages of this approach. It seems to me that - at least in newspapers and magazines - this is a better way to get a representative sample of a period of time. 
However, some of the studies I read on the method sampled news on all themes and I’ll only focus on political news. 
How should I proceed: first map the political news posted during a period of time [2 months] and then constructing my week OR construct the week with all stories from all sections and then analyze only the political topics that appear on the constructed week? 

It seems like the second approach would give a better sample in terms of representing the political news coverage. But since I’ve never worked with this method, I am asking for advice. After all, this list has proven to be very helpful in many occasions :)

Thank you all, in advance, for your contributions! 



Patricia Rossini
Ph.D Student | Department of Social Communication
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil 
Associated researcher at the Media and Public Sphere research group (EME/UFMG)
patriciarossini at ufmg.br
+Academia.edu <http://ufmg.academia.edu/Patr%C3%ADciaRossini>