Coding Categories

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during the above-mentioned timeframe in the three selected newspapers was sampled.

3.1.2 Coding Categories

The categories for the content analysis were developed based on the previous literature and research results on the news coverage, the images of different genders in news coverage, and other related topics. Many Taiwanese scholars’ researches are referenced to take the current circumstances of news covering in Taiwan into

consideration (李淑玲, 1993; 邱金松, 1998; 侯致遠, 1991 ; 施致平, 1992; 廖清海, 1996). The categories are divided into two major parts: (1) the general information of the news reports, including the basic information, use of photographs and tables and (2) the gendered coverage indicators, including description of players’ features, attribution, and symbol dominance. See Appendix 2 for detailed coding categories.

Table 1. The Number of Games of the Jones Cup Men’s Basketball and Women’s Basketball During 2007 to 2009.

2007 2008 2009 Total

Men’s 36 36 45 117

Total Number of The

Games Women’s 21 10 10 41

Men’s 9 9 15 33

Number of The Games Played by The Chinese Taipei

National Team(s) Women’s 11 5 5 21

Total 77 60 75 212

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General Information

Basic Information General information of news is recorded, including the headline, date, size, section, placement, and subject gender. The size and the section and placement of the news reports serve as the indicators for the reference of

emphasis on the report. The subject gender of the news reports was the major independent variable which resulted in the expected existence of gendered coverage of news reports.

Story Type Story type is divided into the straight news, the feature story, and the commentary. Straight news refers to the news which is the routine reports with the function of informing readers for the games. The feature story refers to the news which is purposefully designed for the readers to have more knowledge about the sports, the teams, the players, or other related information other than the games. With the emphasis on news reports, the sampling that was categorized as the commentary was not further coded, but only served as a reference for the amount of the coverage in newspaper.

Main Content Main content is divided into two parts: directly related to the game and irrelevant to the game. The category directly related to the game includes the content with anything related or happening in the basketball court during the games, such as game report, records, game forecast, commentary for the game, team performance, or player performance. The category irrelevant to the game includes the content with anything unrelated to the games or happening out side the basketball court during the games, such as technical analysis, player feature story, promotion for the game, personnel, or other issues irrelevant to the games. When there are more than one main contents related in the news reports, the first that appears in the article is considered as the main content of the news report.

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The source of the information used in the sports news can also serve as the index to examine the value of the news and present how sports news for different genders are covered in applying different news sources, i.e., coach(s), player(s), critic(s)/

scout(s), fan(s), or others. The tone of the news, i.e., positive, negative, or neutral, will also be identified. Performance emphasis is the other category that is aimed to

examine whether the sports news is framed to focus on individual performance or team performance to show the difference between the news covering of the two genders.

Photographs For photograph analysis, the basic measured categories include the size and the numbers of people included. The category of the action of the people is divided into active motion and still motion. The category of the angle applied includes the close up shot, the medium shot, and the long shot to serve as the major indicator for the quality of the photograph and the implication for gendered ideology.

Finally, the category of the emphasis of the caption framing is designed to determine whether the appearance or the sports performance of the players is emphasized.

Tables The table analysis is divided into three categories: whether there is the table included, the size of the table, and the content of the table. The content of the table is further divided into options as: team score, personal score, team performance statistics in a single game, personal performance statistics in a single game, team performance statistics in previous games, personal performance statistics in previous games, and others.

Gendered Coverage Indicators

Based on previous research on gendered coverage on female sports news reports (Duncan & Messner, 1998; Eastman & Billings, 1999; 洪嘉凌, 2003; 陳秀娟, 1997;

連思晨, 2008), gendered coverage indicators are the most important measurement for

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the quality of the coverage in this study. Three categories include description of players’ features, attribution, and symbol dominance.

Description of Players’ Features The category of the description of players’

features is divided into masculine or feminine in order to examine whether gendered stereotypes exist in sports news. Masculine characteristics include those

“instrumental” features related to task-accomplishing, such as ambitious, leader-like, competitive, determined, independent, decisive, dominant etc., while feminine characteristics include those which are mainly “expressive” and related to

interpersonal relationship, such as careful, friendly, ameable, graceful, emotional, affectionate etc. (李美枝, 1984).

Attribution The category of attribution whether the description of ambivalence or the agency for successes and failures of the game existing in the reports appears in the sports news. In addition, a category is further designed to determine the type of the agency of successes and failures, whether the winning or lost is attributed to the player’s competence, the opponent’s incompetence, or other uncontrollable factors. The category of formulae of exclusion is for recording the presence of the news reporters for explaining missing made by the players during the game.

Symbol Dominance Symbol dominance is designed to determine whether the content of the sports news is embedded with the gendered values with the possible ways as follows, so as to measure the degree of gendered coverage in the sports news:

(1) gender marking – specifically identifying sports for men or women and thus stressing the difference of the male and female; (2) infantilization/ hierarchies of naming – ranking men higher then women, forming the unequal status for the two genders; (3) sexualization – emphasizing the appearance or feminine features of the female athletes and thus trivializing their performance in sports.

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