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WHY CONTENT ANALYSIS?
This research explores the difference in media coverage between male and female sports journalists and dives deeper into gender stereotypes. While studies focusing on male and female athletes are numerous, very few studies exist on women who work as sports journalists. The sports industry continues to be male-dominated, but as more women continue to join this industry, there are constant issues that women deal with on a daily basis. Exploring different sports journalists’ Instagram pages will help understand why sports media coverage gears towards men’s sports over women’s.
Content analysis will gather quantitative data to compare sports journalists’ genders and the kinds of posts they share with their audiences. For instance, the notion that women post more personal or appearance-based content than their male counterparts is evaluated. Social media’s emergence as a premier platform for many people in the sports industry bears impacts investigation concerning female sports journalists’ entrance to and success in the field.
Existing studies of similar scopes use content analysis to assess sports media trends by effectively reaching a broad population of women and men in the industry. Mondello and Vincent (2009) looked at research using “content analysis of online NCAA basketball coverage for both the men’s and women’s tournaments that physical appearance was mentioned 378 times in 180 articles about male athletes, compared to just 51 times over 69 articles about women’s athletes.” While there is plenty of other sports research done using content analysis, looking at 20 different sports journalists’ platforms and focusing on what their posts are about will help find answers to why men’s sports are talked about more than women’s in general.
Photos by Google Images
Hull (2016) mentioned, “Females (professional journalists or not) have the opportunity to run their own sports blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts devoted to women’s sports.” With the amount of freedom sports journalists have on their platforms, investigating how they can benefit women in the field is essential. Analyzing Instagram posts of both men and women will reveal existing gender stereotypes and the degree to which they impact people in the industry. In the realm of social media, these stereotypes include the expectation that women post more content related to their personal lives and appearance than actual sports coverage. In contrast, men are seen as hard workers who only care about their jobs. While all three research questions use gender as the independent variable, the dependent variables range from assessing whether the post is personal or sports-related, the gender of the sports posted, and which gender of journalist posts more frequently about women’s sports.
Male vs. Female
Instagram Posts
Population
Selecting the specific population needed for this research included stratified sampling: by choosing my sample set, I found sports journalists online by Googling search terms including “list of female sports journalists” and “list of male sports journalists.” I gathered the first four women from the website Be On Air, a national broadcast media organization, by picking 10 female sports journalists. I vetted whether these women had Instagram profiles, making a note to investigate further those who did. For the following six female sports journalists, I used the site Good Sport and went down the list to write their names (double-checking to make sure they had Instagram profiles). The same technique was used in selecting 10 male sports journalists, using Joe Chelesnik’s website Sportscasters Talent Agency of America. Tracking 10 Instagram posts per each of the 20 journalists selected resulted in 200 total units. From the years 2018 to 2020, I will gather screenshots of whatever type of posts are released by each sports journalist (typically videos or photos).
Females:
Rachel Nichols
Jaime Maggio
Erin Andrews
Hannah Storm
Samantha Ponder
Charissa Thompson
Cari Champion
Holly Rowe
Jessica Mendoza
Sage Steele
Males:
Pat Boylan
Scott Braun
Kevin Fitzgerald
Mike Monaco
Joe Musso
Chris Vosters
Stephen Smith
Kirk Herbstreit
Tony Romo
Micheal Wilbon
With ten categories for the codebook, the coder will fill out a google form sheet with questions about the post. The codesheet is outlined with four columns of concept categories, coding categories, operational definition, and instructions to follow by the coders. Each of the codebook categories is designed to support all three of the research questions and gather more media coverage information for females in the sports industry. Evaluating intercoder reliability calculated to .94, which is a strong number.
This research will be examined by a second coder that fills 10% of the 200 units, 20 posts. These 20 posts are picked randomly by the coder themself with only ten males and ten female posts. Applying the same coding instrument and using the specific formula for calculating the intercoder reliability will gather a number between 0 having no agreement and one completely agreeing with the answers.
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