Content analysis

The aim of the project was: To conduct a 'high-level' content analysis of the press coverage of the 2001 election campaign. The analysis has resulted in the creation of a 'campaign dataset' which will enable movements in opinion during the campaign to be related to press coverage of the campaign.

NB This page allows access to the initial release versions of the various datasets generated by the Content Analysis component of the 2001-02 British Election Study. A full and clean set of datasets will be submitted to the UK Data Archive later this year. In the meantime, anything that needs to be added or changed will, as soon as possible, be added to or changed in the files accessible via this page. However, as an additional safeguard, a list of these changes can be viewed by following the link.

Six files are available for downloading.
NB If you experience problems downloading the datasets, please click on this link.

User guide and coding frame available in both MS Word and pdf format

Dataset of campaign articles content-coded using the coding schema (For comparison with the content analysis conducted for the 1997 British General Election campaign "pageno = 1" identifies all front-page campaign articles)

Dataset of non-campaign front-page articles partially content-coded using the coding schema

Dataset of front-page campaign headlines

Dataset of front-page non-campaign headlines

Dataset of campaign headlines sampled from the main sections of newspapers



Click here to see some highlights of the content analysis results using the dataset of campaign articles (1440 cases)

Data from the 1997 Press Coverage study are available from The UK Data Archive

Click here to view the results of the reliability testing



For queries regarding the data and their use, please e-mail Prof. David Sanders at the BES in Essex.