Test Essay

TEST ESSAY Title

Fear of Crime : The Production of News by the Media

Research Design

This study will examine how the media constructs fear of crime for women , and explains why . It will employ both content analysis and quantitative statistical analysis to evaluate media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety . First I will define and expand upon the quantitative component of this research : content analysis . Second , I will expand on the quantitative component of this research by applying statistical analysis and interpretation

of meaning

This research will utilize content analysis , a widely accepted measurement approach to social science This research design involves the systematic study of messages , which seeks to show patterns or regularities in content through repetition (Ericson , et al , 1999 Content analysis is a technique for gathering and analyzing the content of text . According to Neuman (2000 , content refers to words , meanings pictures , symbols , ideas , themes , or any message that can be communicated . The text is anything written , visual , or spoken that serves as a medium for communication such as books , news or magazine articles , advertisements , speeches , films , musical lyrics , or photographs . It can be traced back to the very beginning of the media coverage of crime and justice including anecdotal observations in the press , systematic sampling , column inch counts , and official crime statistics as a point of comparison (Schlesinger et al , 1999 . This makes content analysis an appropriate research design for this research as I take into consideration an analysis of crime and the media Specifically , I employ quantitative content analysis to examine the manifest content of texts through systematic counting and recording procedures . Since this will have a theoretical structure , I will be coding for content through statistical analysis by quantifying the number and percentages of crime messages over a certain period the type of crime message types of crime discussed the source of knowledge in the message the message intimate versus stranger danger personal versus property crime mentions of sexual danger and altruism . My goal will be to find the form and content that crime messages took in to analyze their particular constructions and representations of fear

Research questions /hypotheses

I would like to answer the following questions in this research

1 . Do crime messages signify fear of crime

2 . How do the media define fear and reveal its meaning to audience members

3 . Is this reality ' contested over time , and if so , why

Independent and Dependent variables

The independent variables are the crime messages such as 1 , property crime 2 , personal crime 3 , other message outside these definitional boundaries since my goal is to examine how fear and crime are constructed in the media . The dependent variable on the other hand , is the media construction or generation of fear of crime which will be based on the four components of crime presentation : 1 . form of crime reporting 2 . news , sources , and the production of meaning 3 . gender and crime narratives and 4 . amount of sensationalism used...