With the rapid development of internet technology, the rise of online news websites has changed the way people access to news. There is an obvious trend that people are getting used to read news on internet (Salwen, 2005). So it is very important to analyse the content of these websites. In this essay, I will take the reports of ‘Haiti Earthquake’ as an example. Earthquake, as an important of disasters, always attracts great attentions of public. Consequently, a huge number of reports and news from both online and offline are following. The mainly purpose of this essay is doing a quantitative content analysis of the way of reporting in news webpages in the United Kingdom during the period of Haiti Earthquake.
随着互联网技术的飞速发展，在线新闻网站的崛起已经改变了的人获得的消息。有一个明显的趋势，人们已习惯于看新闻在互联网上（Salwen，2005年）。因此，它是非常重要的，对这些网站的内容进行分析。在这篇文章中，我一定代写英国coursework会的报告“海地地震”为例。作为一种重要的灾害，地震，总是吸引了公众的极大关注。因此，大量的报道和消息在线和离线以下。这篇文章的主要目的是做一个量化的内容分析报告的方式，在海地地震期间在英国的新闻网页。
In January 2010, a big earthquake hit Haiti, reportedly killing more than 200,000 people, injuring 300,000and left over one million homeless. After the earthquake, many countries include Britain and organizations over the world sent aids and supports to help victims in Haiti. As an international media event, Haiti Earthquake was reported by a lot of news media. The content of what British news media respond to this event is the target I will analyse in this essay.
2010年1月的大地震袭击了海地，据报道，死亡人数超过20人，打伤30万，剩下的100万人无家可归。地震发生后，许多国家包括英国和世界各地的组织发送艾滋病和支持，以帮助海地灾民。作为一个国际媒体事件，海地地震报道了大量的新闻媒体。英国的新闻媒体对此事件做出响应的内容我将在这篇文章中分析的目标。
Research Method Description:研究方法说明：
Content analysis has a long history of use in communication, journalism, sociology, psychology and business. Historically, the development of content analysis is influenced deeply by the development of mass media and by international politics (Titscher et al, 2000). During World War period, due to the aim of extracting information from propaganda, a huge number of content analysis work had done, consequently, content analysis technique grew fast at that time.
内容分析法，通讯，新闻学，社会学，心理学和业务的使用有着悠久的历史。从历史上看，发展的内容分析是深受影响的大众传播媒体的发展和国际政治（Titscher等人，2000）。在第一次世界大战期间，由于提取信息，从宣传的目的，内容分析工作做了一个巨大的数字，因此，内容分析技术，当时快速增长。
After the war, the use of content analysis spread to numerous theories and disciplines (Krippendorff, 2004). One of the most famous definitions of content analysis in early stage is made by Berelson in his ‘Content Analysis in Communication Research’ (1952). He defined content analysis as ‘a research technique for the objective systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication’ (p18). According to Holsti (1969), the definition of Berelson indicated a view that content is a basic tool which may be useful in research problems. Furthermore, Holsti (1969) believe content is ‘any technique for making references by objectively and systemically identifying specified characteristics of messages’ (p14). Both Berelson and Holsti agreed that content analysis has two qualities: objectivity and being systematic, in other word, anyone who employed this method could hopefully get same results.
Moreover, Berelson (1952) also emphasize ‘quantitative description’ in his definition. The aim of quantitative research is to produce quantitative accounts of the raw material by classifying messages through specified rules (Bryman, 2004). This means that content analysis is not an exploring research method, it can only be used in support, qualify and refute the questions researchers posed. Deacon et al (2007) state content analysis is an extremely directive method. It allows the researcher to test theoretical issues to enhance the understanding of the data (Elo and Kyngas, 2008).
By contrast and summarizing the different definitions, Neuendorf (2002) state that ‘content analysis is a summarizing, quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method and is not limited as to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented (p10)’.
Research Questions:
Both Deacon et al (2007) and Bryman (2004) believe that it is extremely important to define the research questions clearly and precisely before conducting the analysis. Due to the quantitative nature of content analysis, it can only answer specified questions instead of create questions. In practice, the process of defining research concerns mainly uses qualitative research methods. To some extent, content analysis is a set of qualitative and quantitative methods for collecting and analysing data (Kondracki et al, 2002).
In this case, the key focus of my study is to analysis how British news media respond to the Haiti Earthquake after disaster and what they focus on in their news. However, these are not good questions suited for content analysis, because they are too abstract and hard to answer directly. Deacon et al (2007) state good research questions should be detailed and quantitative. In order to make the study more effective, I would justify the research questions as following:
D
Sample Selecting:
Depended on the research questions, the total range content being made references about in this study is the news coverage reporting Haiti Earthquake in British news webpages during early 2010. But this is a huge number of cases; it means we have to use sampling. It is possible to use a small number of samples to examine the whole relevant materials (Titscher et al, 2000). So the core reason of sampling is to generate a manageable number of data from a large scale content population.
Following Bryman’s (2004) phases in selection of sample, we could define the media and dates. First of all, in defining sampling media, research conducted by Salwen (2005) indicated that the most popular and influential news website are operated by press media or broadcasting media, such as BBC News. So in this study, I will take BBC News and Mail Online (operated by Daily Mail). Secondly, the sampling dates also need to be defined. Bryman (2004) believe the decision about dates is influenced by the occurrence of a phenomenon. Haiti Earthquake happened in January 2010, so on purpose of make sampling more time-sensitive, I would like to sample from January 2010 to March 2010.
Counting Plan:
Research Instruments
Data Collecting and Analysing
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