European Social Survey Developing A Methodological Tool For News Event Analysis for use in relation to the European Social Survey (ESSi: N4) Funded by a European Union Infrastructure Bid within the European Social Survey Start Date: April 2006 for 4 years EurPolCom was commissioned to develop a method for retrieving events from newspapers to be used in conjunction with the European Social Survey (http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/) and is now a partner of the ESS. The aim is to produce a database (from newspaper coding) that will enable us to identify national differences in the 'political climate', and to deduce from such cross-national variations, whether special/exceptional factors may have influenced a national distribution of survey responses at a given time. This four year project is being undertaken by Paul Statham, Priyasha Kaul and Howard Tumber. Year one During the first phase, activities were undertaken to lay down a firm long-term foundation by assessing key priorities for exploration. In pursuit of the this aim, an extensive review of existing state of art methods, approaches and literature on news content and event analysis, especially those applied within a cross national comparative framework, was undertaken. Outputs included a paper by Paul Statham and Howard Tumber presented at a meeting of the ESS national co-ordinators in February 2007 at Mannheim, then a more developed version at the European Social Survey Conference in Prague, June 2007. New input was sought from the national co-ordinators on their experiences of using the eventnet by sending out a detailed questionnaire. The feedback obtained for increasing the usability and user friendliness was compiled and has been drawn upon, systematically, for developing the new methodological tool. Year two In the second year the pilot scheme for the project was launched in relation to round three of the European Social Survey. Five countries out of those participating in round three of the ESS have been selected for the pilot study. Emphasis was laid on ensuring the inclusion of countries along the different axes of North/South, East/West Europe and old/new democracies. On the basis of these criteria, the following countries, UK, Germany, Poland, Spain and Ireland, have been selected. Subsequently, a study of the media landscapes, drawn from secondary sources, was compiled for these countries, in order to gauge cross-national variations, particularly with regard to their national newspaper media and the structure of their publics spheres of mediated communication. This research also facilitated our selection of the 'best fit' functionally equivalent newspapers, for these countries. Written media landscape reports for these countries were produced by Priyasha Kaul. For the purposes of the pilot study, a coding scheme has been developed in relation to the core modules of the survey questionnaire used in the round three of the European Social Survey. This will facilitate the coding of the media salience of relevant issues/events in national debates. We are currently at the stage of testing and developing the proposed coding scheme in one country, the UK, prior to testing it on further countries. This requires testing the scheme with different news reports, coding them, and then fine-tuning the existing coding scheme, by referring to and discussing anomalous cases. Relevant articles are selected and coded using the claims analysis method for event variables such as actor, claim, field of claim, addressee of claim and the ESS issue field. The results will be used for further development of the coding scheme, then for preparing for the next phase (pilot) of cross national coding of newspaper articles. For more details please contact Priyasha Kaul or Paul Statham See working papers and publications for current outputs.