Earlier in the project, an initial consideration to test the impact of social media upon the democratic process was to contrast the reporting of events on social media sites in comparison to the traditional press. This was at a stage when the methodological approach of the overall project was undecided and discourse analysis was being considered to ascertain if social media reporting was improving the democratic process or not, in terms of its lack of restriction as it operates free from the commercial interests of traditional news organisations.
This approach was eventually decided against in favour of concentrating upon identifying specific issues, events, and topics for detailed analysis for example, issues of trolling and instances of significant mobilisation. The reason for this decision was primarily based upon the notion that these previously documented issues, alongside new ones, when interpreted through a unique setting of a Scottish independence referendum, would make a more important academic contribution than an approach restricted to discourse analysis. This still
Chapter 5 – Methodology 90 required structured monitoring of the traditional press in combination with social media monitoring. Scottish newspapers such as The Herald and The Daily Record along with Scottish editions of The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Mirror, The Telegraph, the Guardian and The Independent were chosen to give a balanced spread of tabloids and broadsheets.
Newspaper databases such as LexisNexis and International News Stand were to be used to search for articles to contrast with coverage of the same stories in blogs and Twitter (often highlighted by The Referendum Daily as detailed in the previous subsection), and latterly to identify issues as previously discussed. It was presumed that this would be a simple process of searching for articles via search terms such as ‘SNP independence white paper’, however, what soon became apparent was that accessing specific Scottish editions of UK titles was far from straight forward. In publication searches within International News Stand there are thousands of available titles ranging from The Bombay Times to The Hackney Gazette, however, when searching for example for The Scottish Daily Mail, there was no such title to be found, although Scotland specific titles such as The Daily Record were easily accessible.
Assuming that there must be a simple answer to the problem, a meeting was arranged with the senior librarian for the RGU Business School. The librarian had a detailed understanding of both LexisNexis and International News Stand but had not come across this issue before.
It was decided that it was not possible to access such titles and suggested that a different approach should be taken, and contact was made with The Scottish National Library and the British Library for suggestions of other ways of accessing titles digitally. Again, however, no solution to the problem was found and it became apparent that the only way to access this information was to plan visits to the Central Aberdeen Library and manually search historic copies of the chosen titles, a procedure which would be significantly onerous and would be likely to mean a revision of overall planned activity with the research design. Consequently, the only option was to use national titles via databases and Google searches which largely restricted content to digital UK editions.
It is important to note that a decision was taken early in the project in keeping with the qualitative approach, to search for articles relating to specific targeted exemplars of content initially based upon both general occurrences and significant topics, which could be categorised as those which fulfilled Kuhn’s five functions of the media (2007) (as discussed earlier and also in the following subsection relating to interview structure and anonymity) and latterly the units of analysis contained in Freelon’s Model of Democratic Communication (2010) (see subsection 5.11). The focus was to compile deliberative and agonistic
Chapter 5 – Methodology 91 occurrences during the debate rather than compiling and analysing a random time-based sample. Additionally, a broader range of literature in both the traditional and new media was collected detailing the major events and general story of the referendum which could then later be used to make a secondary search on Twitter to compare how the social media debate played out in comparison to traditional sources. When Freelon’s Model of Democratic Communication (2010) was identified, the existing sample and additional sources were collected that fitted not only with deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism, but also liberal individualist and communitarian behaviour, in order to adequately test Freelon’s model against the reality of the independence referendum debate.
In a similar method to that employed to collate the data collected from Twitter, relevant articles from the printed press were saved digitally and also printed out in hard copy and catalogued together with the Twitter data. The collection of Tweets, digital articles, and articles from the traditional press were then segmented into the units of analysis taken from Freelon (2010) (see data analysis section). This provided a valuable, chronological, timeline of events and issues as the debate progressed which was subsequently instrumental in the data analysis section of the study. Formalised data collection from both traditional press sources and Twitter began in November 2013 and ceased at the end of January 2015, however, certain reflective works beyond this date were also considered as part of the study. The following table details the number of Tweets, digital articles, and traditional press articles chosen for further analysis, segmented by unit of analysis:
Chapter 5 – Methodology 92 Unit of Analysis Tweets Blogs/digital
articles
Traditional press articles
Total
Monologue 16 11 15 42
Personal revelation 9 6 4 19
Personal showcase 14 3 0 17
Flaming 38 28 16 82
Ideological fragmentation
10 7 4 21
Mobilisation 28 17 7 52
Community language 19 20 2 41
Intra-ideological questioning/reciprocity
18 11 3 32
Rational-critical argument
13 7 8 28
Public issue focus - - - -
Equality 23 26 4 53
Discussion topic focus - - - -
Inter-ideological questioning/reciprocity
5 3 2 10
Total 193 139 65
Table 5 Data variables segmented by unit of analysis
Chapter 5 – Methodology 93