The purpose of this content analysis is to find out to what extend did the UK Media personalise the NHS crisis to the person of Patricia Hewitt?

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CONTENTS


Executive Summary

Content analysis is a research tool used to determine the presence of certain words or concepts within texts or sets of texts. Researchers quantify and analyse the presence, meanings and relationships of such words and concepts, then make inferences about the messages within the texts, the writer(s), the audience, and even the culture and time of which these are a part. Texts can be defined broadly as books, book chapters, essays, interviews, discussions, newspaper headlines and articles, historical documents, speeches, conversations, advertising, theatre, informal conversation, or really any occurrence of communicative language. Texts in a single study may also represent a variety of different types of occurrences, such as Palmquist's 1990 study of two composition classes, in which he analysed student and teacher interviews, writing journals, classroom discussions and lectures, and out-of-class interaction sheets. To conduct a content analysis on any such text, the text is coded or broken down into manageable categories on a variety of levels -- word, word sense, phrase, sentence, or theme -- and then examined using one of content analysis' basic methods: conceptual analysis or relational analysis.

Historically, content analysis was a time consuming process. Analysis was done manually, or slow mainframe computers were used to analyze punch cards containing data punched in by human coders. Single studies could employ thousands of these cards. Human error and time constraints made this method impractical for large texts. However, despite its impracticality, content analysis was already an often utilised research method by the 1940's. Although initially limited to studies that examined texts for the frequency of the occurrence of identified terms (word counts), by the mid-1950's researchers were already starting to consider the need for more sophisticated methods of analysis, focusing on concepts rather than simply words, and on semantic relationships rather than just presence (de Sola Pool 1959). While both traditions still continue today, content analysis now is also utilised to explore , and their linguistic, affective, cognitive, social, cultural and historical significance ().


Content Analysis Design

Recently, the UK media has “discovered” a crisis that will affect the Department of Health in the UK. Specifically, this year the NHS faces a financial crisis according to which health authorities predict a shortfall in cash of hundreds of millions of pounds

Following the UK general election in 2005, Patricia Hewitt became the Secretary of State for Health and since then she has had the responsibility of dealing with health issues and inspecting the process of the national health system contributing to the ideal performance of the health sector in the UK.

One year later in April 2006, Patricia Hewitt stated and justified the NHS’s “best performance” as regards to the previous year. However, this statement was rather challenging taking into consideration the decision for staff reductions in every NHS department due to the budget deficits. Redundancies in the NHS department provoke a variety of reactions. Consequently, the financial crisis in the NHS will be under the spectrum of our analysis (www.healthmatters.org.uk).

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Purpose of the Research

The purpose of this content analysis is to find out to what extend did the UK Media personalise the NHS crisis to the person of Patricia Hewitt?

It is commonly known that the media influences dramatically on audience attitudes to different problems. Analysing the way media reported on the latest NHS crisis will help to find out what impressions audiences were getting through the media which obviously helped to form their opinion. This analysis might also help to find out who was to blame for this crisis according to the UK Media. The ...

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