Methodological Appendix

Summary

A copy of the complete codebook used in the content analysis, including detailed instructions to coders on how to handle ambiguous statements, is available at www.ssc.wisc.edu/abortionstudy. This Web site also includes additional data on our procedures for sampling articles, a complete list of the German and U.S. organizations surveyed, the questionnaire used in the survey of organizations, and some of the data sets used in our various analyses.

The brief appendix provided here, which complements our Chapter Three on methods, lists the spokespersons and journalists whom we interviewed. It also provides a short summary that the reader may use to gain a better idea of how we operationalized a number of key variables. But for a full exposition with examples, consult the Web site listed.

The following appendix has three main sections, outlining first the persons with whom we conducted interviews, then the main ideas that were represented in each of the eight frames in all three specific directions in the content analysis, and then the particular cross-frame clusters of ideas that were used to create other variables.

THE INTENSIVE INTERVIEWS

As described in Chapter Three, we completed interviews with spokespersons for selected U.S. and German organizations (aside from state agencies) who were involved, directly or indirectly, in shaping abortion discourse (for the selection criteria, see Chapter Three). We also interviewed a small number of journalists who frequently wrote on abortion for the newspapers in our sample.