[Air-L] Constructed Week Sampling Online News

[Jeanine Finn]

Hi there-

Constructed-week sampling is pretty well-established in news media research.

You might look at: 

Riffe D, Aust CF and Lacy SR (1993) The effectiveness of random, consecutive day and constructed week sampling in newspaper content analysis. Journalism Quarterly (70)1: 133–139. (to explain the method, but it an analog context) and

Artwick, C.G. 2013. News sourcing and gender on Twitter. Journalism. (Nov. 2013) as another recent online example.

I though Neuendorf’s Content Analysis Guidebook covered this method, but I can’t seem to find it in the index. If you have a copy of that handy, you might also try and take a look there.

Best,
Jeanine




> On May 20, 2015, at 12:03 PM, Patricia Rossini <patyrossini at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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>
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
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<---------------------------------------------------->
Jeanine Finn
Doctoral Student
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
jefinn at utexas.edu
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~jefinn/