Sample selection

Sampling is important both for focusing a study and ensuring its validity. As Krippendorff says: “The universe of available texts is too large to be examined as a whole, so content analysts need to limit their research to a manageable body of texts” (2004, p. 111). This section discusses how sampling was used in this study.

4.2.5.1 Newspaper selection

This study focused on newspapers. A total of seven newspapers were analysed in this study (see Table 4). The papers were selected for their geographical proximity to Mt Ruapehu and therefore to the lahar. The concept of ‘news values’ suggest that the media regard local events as news as opposed to events that take place far away (Galtung & Ruge, 1973). Therefore, the lahar had more newsworthiness for the Wellington-based

Dominion Post than its Fairfax sister publication, the Christchurch-based The Press. For this reason, this content analysis looked only at stories appearing in North Island-based newspapers.

This study examined four metropolitan dailies(Dominion, Evening Post, Dominion Post

and the NZ Herald), two regional dailies (Waikato Times and Manawatu Standard) and one local weekly (Ruapehu Press). The coverage from The Dominion and The Evening Post covers the period from 1996 to 2002. This is because in 2002 the Dominion and

The Evening Post merged to form the Dominion Post. Riffe et al. (2005) believe that a weakness in many content analysis’s that analyse newspaper coverage is that they ignore weekly papers. The selection of the Ruapehu Press, a community paper

distributed in the Ohakune-Taumaranui region acknowledges the importance of weekly papers. It was also selected for its role as a local source of news in the Ruapehu area. It was decided that analysing the lahar coverage printed in a local paper would be useful for understanding how people in the Ruapehu region received messages about the lahar in their local paper.

Table 4: Newspapers sampled in the content analysis

Type of newspaper Newspapers

Metropolitan daily

• Dominion (1996 – 2002)

• Evening Post (1996 – 2002)

• Dominion Post (2002 – 2007)

• NZ Herald

Provincial daily • Manawatu Standard

• Waikato Times Community weekly • Ruapehu Press

NB: Newspapers were sampled from June 1996- June 2007 unless otherwise noted.

4.2.5.2 Article Selection

The articles analysed in this study were identified using two sampling methods. Kaid and Wadsworth (1989) suggest that content analysis samples follow two guidelines: (1) that they are representative of the texts being sampled and (2) that they are of sufficient size to accurately represent those texts. In following these guidelines, this study used two sampling processes Krippendorff (2004) refers to as ‘relevance sampling’ and ‘census sampling’. Relevance sampling involves a process by which the texts to be analysed are selected through a set of limits designed to narrow the sample. In this study, the keywords “Ruapehu” and “lahar” were used to find the relevant texts. It was decided that these were the fundamental keywords as it is difficult to discuss any lahar stemming from Mt Ruapehu without using those words.

Census sampling was the second type of sampling used in this study. A census sample contains all the texts relating to a particular subject. Krippendorff describes the census sampling process thus: “If content analysts want to know something about the press coverage of a given event and collect all newspaper articles pertaining to the event, that complete set of texts constitutes a census” (2004, p. 120). This content analysis covers the period from June 1, 1996 to June 30, 2007. Conveniently, the lahar provided a natural census sample. The lahar risk was announced in 1996. Twelve years later, on March 18, 2007, it broke through the crater rim. The result was the 11 year time period

– June 1996 to June 2007 - used in this study. The study period continued until June 2007 to include any recurring coverage of the lahar for analysis of the lahar’s lifecycle.

4.2.5.3 Locating the news articles

The Newztext Plus database was used to create an index of lahar articles. As described in the last section, the keywords ‘lahar’ and ‘Ruapehu’ were chosen as the search terms. The initial search focused on finding all the articles for each year from 1996 to 2007. Parameters were set for each search restricting them to the period 01 January XXXX to 31 December XXXX for the year being searched. These limits meant that all the news articles relating to the lahar for that year would be found. When all the articles available on Newztext Plus had been obtained, these results were then cross-checked with the results from two other databases, Factiva and Index New Zealand (INNZ). The additional results from these databases were then added to the lists compiled from Newztext.

4.2.5.4 Accessing copies of newspapers for analysis

After the lists were cross-checked, the ‘news indexes’ for the years were divided into lists sorted by publication. While the three news databases provided a copy of the text of the article, they did not show how the article was represented in the original text in terms of placement, size of story and accompanying visuals. Obtaining ‘physical’ copies of the articles was critical for assessing the salience of the stories by story size and placement (see 4.2.6.1 for explanation of how salience was measured in this study).

Microfilm versions of the newspapers were sourced from the Massey University library (Dominion, Dominion Post and New Zealand Herald), National Library (Evening Post,

Waikato Times) and Palmerston North City Library (Manawatu Standard). Physical copies from National Library archives were used to obtain the articles from the Ruapehu Press.

The publication lists were used to identify the dates on which the stories were published. From these dates, the corresponding microfilm was obtained and two

the page. This copy was used for examining the amount of space the article took up on the page and its placement. The second copy, a more-readable close-up, was used to analyse the frames and sources in the article.

To ensure that articles not included in the database were found, microfilm copies of the NZ Herald were checked at key dates in the lahar’s management. These ‘key dates’ were identified due to coverage in other publications (e.g. Dominion, Evening Post,

Manawatu Standard, Waikato Times) during those times. This method was successful in locating many of the early articles, which were not indexed by the online databases. It was also discovered that the database search had missed a large number of articles from the Ruapehu Press. Further, while the articles returned by the database were printed in the paper, in print they had different titles. For this reason, every issue of the Ruapehu Press was examined from 1996 to 2007.