“How are Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and/or protestors represented by news media?”

Descriptionyou will work to produce a partial qualitative research report relating to prejudice in news media. You will be looking to address the following research question:

“How are Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and/or protestors represented by news media?”

You should collect a sample of newspaper articles and carry out thematic analysis to analyse the data, following the steps outlined in Braun and Clarke (2006, 2019). Please note this can refer to the resurgence of BLM protestors before, during or after June 2020, in the UK, US, South Africa or elsewhere.

You may wish to revisit your research methods training to help you devise a sampling strategy (e.g. considering which newspapers to sample from, which search terms to use, etc.)

We suggest collecting no more than 15 newspaper articles, in to keep the task manageable. An efficient way to gather news articles is via the ‘News Resources’ area of the Leeds Beckett University library. Using the links to key news sources identified on this page will allow you to search for specific phrases, date ranges and publication types. LexisNexis UK Newspapers or ‘Lexis Library News’ is a particularly good source to use when gathering your sample if you want to look at UK coverage (please explore this resource from the library – it is a fascinating resource . If you wish to look at other newspapers please try to access these systematically. However, if you cannot access a systematic example for a good reason (e.g., if you are looking for international articles or historical articles – then that is okay too: every sample will have its limitations and not being a systematic sample is a limitation but this can be justified).

Your partial report should consist of the following sections:

Method & Analysis

Method

Sources: Outline the steps taken in to gather your sample, describing and justifying any sampling decisions made (e.g. publication choice, article timeframes, search terms, etc.).

Analytical process: Provide an overview of steps followed in to generate your themes, and provide some illustrative examples to evidence this process.

Analysis

Theme summary: You should include an overview summarizing your themes, any subthemes and how these themes are related to each other. You can do this using a diagram, table or paragraph of text.

Themes: Write up your final themes, providing supporting extracts from the transcript for each in turn. You may find it useful to revisit your research methods work to help with this process, and to access published research which makes use of thematic analysis and/or related topics.

2000 Words Max, including references, extracts etc