Section II - Methodology

The content analysis was modelled as closely as possible after the study conducted by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, The Internet and the Family: The View from Parents, The View from the Press (May 1999). The Annenberg study's content analysis was formatted to correspond directly with the questionnaire used to discern which issues, sources, and opinions were being reported in news articles regarding the Internet and its impact on families. It was divided according to the following issues:

1) What issues do the papers raise about the Internet and its impact on the family?

2) What kinds of people speak about the Internet and family in the articles, and what do they say?

The Canada's Children In A Wired World questionnaire was divided into three sections:

1) Family use of the Internet.

2) General knowledge and perceptions about issues related to children and the Internet, including online activities and practices in the home.

3) Responses and proposed solutions in regard to issues involving children and the Internet.

The content analysis focused on articles found in eight major daily Canadian newspapers, chosen for their geographic representation. Table 1 lists the newspapers, their owners, the number of articles retrieved from each newspaper, and their per cent of the total.

Table 1: The Newspapers in the study

Newspaper	Number of Articles	Per Cent of Total
The Globe and Mail (Thomson)	114	36.5%
The Ottawa Citizen (Southam)	59	19%
The Montreal Gazette (Southam)	36	11%
The Toronto Star (Torstar)	30	9.6%
The Calgary Herald (Southam)	26	8.3%
La Presse (Probec)	23	7.3%
The Halifax Daily News (Southam)	9	2.8%
The Vancouver Sun (Southam)	8	2.5%

Note: There were a total of 312 articles in the study.

Various databases were searched, including Canadian News Disc, Dow Jones, Canadian Business & Current Affairs, and CEDROM-Sni for French-language publications. Keyword searches included the terms: Internet, Web, online, family, families, children, parent, parents, youth, teens.

The Annenberg study's content analysis broke down the selected articles into broad categories: benefits/advantages of the Internet, and problems/disadvantages of the Internet. Benefits associated with the Internet included psychological effects on children and the family, improvement of well-being, and educational benefits.

Problems and disadvantages associated with the Internet were identified as: sites featuring criminal activity, explicit sexual content, pornography, child pornography, stalking, online hate, breaches of privacy and illegal content.

Annenberg's sources were also coded and broken down into categories: educators, journalists, businesspeople, government officials, spokespeople for the criminal justice system, and representatives of advocacy organizations.

Our coding scheme, on the other hand, was designed to be simultaneously broad and specific. We included content issues within benefits and problems. Benefits included education, social effects, electronic democracy, e-commerce uses, and recreation/entertainment value. Problems were categorized as: pornography, child pornography, hate literature, online crimes, privacy violations, marketing practices that target children, potential health hazards, gambling, auctioning, and lack of francophone content. In addition, we coded articles that either questioned the value of technology, provided guides and tip sheets, or talked about Internet use and participation. Appendix 1 provides a more detailed breakdown of the coding scheme.

 

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Source: Content Analysis of Media Coverage of Internet Content Issues Related to Children and Families in Canada, 1999, prepared by Leslie Regan Shade, Ph.D., Department of communications, University of Ottawa.