Research design and data collection
Story Seekers research included two main research tools, an online survey sent to experts from media and the nonprofit sector, and content analysis on media outlets from the four countries included in the study, respectively Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. In the construction of the online survey and the content analysis guidelines, we used the studied published by United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2015 – Press Coverage of the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in the EU: A Content Analysis of Five European Countries. UNHCR Report included the following EU countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK and Sweden. The report had similar objectives with our research, and we used it in developing the Story Seekers research tools, following similar research directions, such as: the voices / the actors included in the narratives, the explanations given for the new wave of refugees and migrants, the portraits / identities of the migrants, the groups of migrants or refugees that received the most coverage, and the labels used to describe them.
The local experts from the four countries involved in the Story Seekers project supported us in mapping and developing a list of NGOs and media experts that could provide useful information on the current situation of told and untold stories about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Over 40 experts were included in the database, and the online survey was sent to them and they were also asked to send the survey further to other experts they consider would match the profile of the Story Seekers research. Journalists, bloggers and field experts working with migrants, refugees or asylum seekers were included in the Story Seekers database and received the online survey to respond to. The response rate of the survey was 28%, and the main research themes included in the survey questions were the following: the groups of migrants that receive the most attention in the Nordic countries; the built profile of the migrants – how they are portrayed in the media; the told and untold stories about migrants and about the causes of migration present in the media outlets;
the main story characters / voices included in the media narratives; the expected role of the NGOs in developing the narratives about migrants; and the most relevant newspapers in the four countries (all the questions used in the survey are included in the Annex 1 to this research report).
The content analysis was conducted on 12 media outlets from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The media outlets were selected based on the recommendations made by the experts through the online survey they responded to, and by the Story Seekers local experts involved in the project. In addition, for each country, we included a national public media outlet, as the local experts suggested that the national public media institutions are very relevant sources of information for the general public, in the Nordic countries. The national public media outlets were also mentioned, in the online survey, by the media experts. The Table 1 presents the media outlets selected for each country and the number of articles included in the content analysis.
Table 1, the media outlets and no of articles included in the research
For the articles selection, we chose to include in the research all the articles from 2016 (January 1st to December 3st) that used at least one of the following key words: newcomer, refugee, migrant, asylum seeker, immigrant, migrant, migration. With the help of local experts, we translated the words in the four languages (Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish), and we used stemming search in Retriever (a database of media outlets provided by the University of Oslo Library) and in Google Advanced Search (a program able to search articles in each of the media outlets’ websites). Thus, we chose to use the entire “population” of articles available for 2016, for the 12 media outlets, not only a sample, as we were able then to analyze the content of titles and leads of the articles, through an automatic content analysis software that can be used with big databases (NVivo). In total, we included in the content analysis 9047 articles from the 12 media outlets, from 2016. The titles and leads of these articles were translated to English (the Nvivo software working language) using Google translate, and then multiple, automatic and manual, analyses were run through Nvivo, such as sentiment analysis, themes analysis, word counts queries, in order to discover the main narratives of the media towards the refugees, migrants and asylum seekers.