Chapter 3: Methodology
3.3 Operationalization
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Time frame
The content of the articles must be GE related and between the chosen timeframe of January 1st 2011 to the day of the election, which is 7th May. This timeline is chosen firstly because The Straits Time wrote the first news report on the 2011 GE on the 1st of January titled
“Chiam's aide quits party leadership; Trusted ally tasked to review manifesto cites work abroad as reason”. This is the result of keying in the key words “2011 Singapore General Election (GE)”
into LexisNexis Academic database. Furthermore the official 2011 GE news website has its first relevant news article on the 28th of January titled “53,057 S'poreans checked names in Registers of Electors”, marking January the official start of the 2011 GE.
3.2 Data Collection
For both news outlets, the online version of the articles will be sampled. That is, news taken from the Channelnewsasia.com GE website as well as digital copies of The Straits Time news article taken from LexisNexis Academic (http://lexis-nexis.com) which is a database that has access to 6000 national and regional news, business and legal sources and is a trusted
database by academics. The guided search in LexisNexis Academic required three distinct steps, mainly identification of the newspaper, in this case is The Straits Times, followed by keying in appropriate keywords, in this case “2011 Singapore General Election /GE and lastly choosing articles that is relevant and also fits the rules of the news story/article.
3.3 Operationalization Unit of analysis
The unit of analysis for this study will be news articles on the GE. We will be looking at the written/verbal text of the news article. This means that the following rules should be followed:
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1. News articles should be longer than two inches in length. On a standard-sized column it can be measured with a ruler.
2. Must be written in complete sentences with a central theme.
3. Must not be part of a paid advertisement.
4. Must be a complete story, not a promotional reference for a full story contained elsewhere.
5. The article must be related to the General Elections the PAP and the issues mentioned, i.e., keywords like 2011 General elections, PAP, any names of the PAP candidates and/or politicians, any actions and comments from the PAP candidates and/or politicians, any events of rallies held by the PAP, immigration, housing, inflation.
According to Lynch and Peer (2002) this rules are to ensure the credibility as well as the uniformity of the analysis. The number of words, photography or graphics will not be taken into account, as this study is not focusing the attention on how the media sets the importance, frames and portrays the PAP but rather the study is focusing on the actions done by the PAP.
Variables
Table 6 will look at the theoretical and operational definition of the variables in this content analysis.
Table 6
Theoretical and operational definition of the variables in this content analysis Variable (I=Independent/D
=Dependent)
Theoretical Definition Operational Definition
Type of the story (I) The way that the story is Note: Specific example of each type of style is written in the codebook.
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written/The style that the story is written.
0) General News 1) Feature
2) Commentary/Critique 3) Forum
Topic (I) Topic discussed in the news
item. So as to find out in what situation did the PAP tried restoring their image.
Note: Specific definition of each issue is written in the codebook.
0) Clarification/rebuttal 1) PAP election strategy 2) PAP speeches
3) PAP reforms/promises
Issue being addressed (I) What was being addressed by the PAP in the article
Note: Specific definition of each issue is written in the codebook.
0) Immigration
1) Inflation and inequality 2) Housing
Benoit’s Image Restoration Strategy (D)
The Image Restoration strategies used by the PAP as discussed earlier in the literature review.
Note: Specific examples of each strategy is written in the codebook.
0) None
6) Good intentions 7) Bolstering 8) Minimization 9) Differentiation 10) Transcendence
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11) Attack the accuser 12) Compensation 13) Corrective action
Mortification
3.4 Data Analysis and Coder Reliability
The number of coders used in this study will be 2. Native speakers who grew up in Singapore will be used as coders. The researcher herself and another Singaporean student will be used as coders to code the data. All coders will use similar sheets of coding sheet to record the data. This code sheets will then be inputted into SPSS and analyzed.
Reliability
A pilot coding will be done together to check for intercoder reliability. Coders will go through a coders training where ten percent of randomly chosen articles by SPSS will be coded.
This is to ensure that the codebook is feasible and coding what is meant to coded (Wimmer &
Dominick, 2006). Also, the pilot coding ensures that Benoit’s different image restoration techniques are interpreted accurately by all of the coders. A reliability score of .70 and above should be achieved when calculated using Cohan’s Kappa. This minimum score is considered satisfactory (Lombard, Synder-Duch & Bracken, 2004).
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Inter-coder Reliability test
Several coders training were initiated after the first version of the codebook was
completed. Articles from the data set were than randomly selected by the researcher for training purposes. The codebook was then constantly revised whenever problems aroused while coding, so as to rectify the problem at hand. The actual coding then came about when there was finally a high percentage of agreement between the two coders regarding the articles chosen for coders training. The coder’s training took approximately a month before actual coding started.
For the actual coding, 10 percent of the dataset were randomly selected for the inter-coder reliability test using SPSS. That means, out of the 892 articles that were chosen to be analyzed, 89 were randomly selected by SPSS for use for the inter-code reliability test. The inter-coder dataset was then analyzed using ReCal, “an online utility that computes intercoder/interrater reliability coefficients for nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio-level data” (Freelon, 2011, para 1).
ReCal was created by Freelon for calculating reliability scores that has been proven to be
accurate and used by researchers (Freelon, 2011). The online inter-coder calculator presented the results of the inter-coder reliability scores in Scott’s Pi, Cohen’s Kappa and Krippendorff's Alpha.
However as mentioned earlier, only Cohen’s Kappa score will be taken into account for this research. Cohen’s Kappa is used to access qualitative data and is good to use when only two coders (of which one is the researcher herself) are involved in the coding process (McHugh, 2012), which is the case for this research.
Appendix C shows the results of the inter-coder reliability test and this can be found in the appendix.
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From Appendix C, the Cohen’s Kappa score maintained a minimum of 0.7 and above. By getting the average score of the all the reliabilities score shown in Appendix C, we thus get an overall reliability score of 0.907 (3 decimal points), thus showing the high agreement between the two coders. This however does not include variable 1 (Coder ID), which is not of use in this reliability test. Variables “Others 2” onwards was stated as undefined as none of the 89 samples included data for this category. However it must be noted that due to the fact that out of the 89 data, only a small number of data were considered relevant to be coded, thus a mere one or two disagreement between the coders will result in a large drop in the Cohen’s Kappa score.
The disagreements between the coders are then resolved by discussion of each
disagreement. The codebook is then used to resolve these disagreements by choosing the option that most adhere to the codebook description. This option is used in the actual coding of the full dataset.
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Chapter 4: Results
This study investigates 5 research questions. Firstly we want to find out what strategies were used by the PAP during their image restoration, and then we want to know what was the most commonly used strategy. On top of that, we want to look deeper into the strategies used for each individual issue and how these strategies differ together with the campaign timeline. Lastly, we want to understand the use of mortification as a strategy in the image restoration process.
Answering these questions requires a content analysis of 892 newspaper articles from The Straits Times and Channelnewsasia.com. Each newspaper article is coded for the presence of strategies used by the PAP in regards to immigration, cost of living as well as the housing issue.
This section thus details the results of the content analysis using descriptive analysis on SPSS.
4.1 Descriptive Statistics
Relevancy
Table 7.1Relevance of Dataset
Frequency Percent Valid Percent
Cumulative Percent
Valid
Not
Relevant 812 91.0 91.0 91.0
Relevant 80 9.0 9.0 100.0
Total 892 100.0 100.0
Table 7.1 shows the totally number of data analysed in this research as well as the relevancy of the articles. In the case of our dataset, only 80 out of the 892 articles adhered to the coding rules of relevancy and are coded.
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Frequency of each news outlets
Table 7.2News Outlet (overall)
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent Straits
Times 311 34.9 34.9 34.9
Channelnew
sasia.com 581 65.1 65.1 100.0
Total 892 100.0 100.0
Table 7.3
News Outlet (valid data set)
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent
Valid
Straits
Times 17 21.3 21.3 21.3
Channelnew
sasia.com 63 78.8 78.8 100.0
Total 80 100.0 100.0
As seen in table 7.2, there are a totally of 311 articles from the dataset that belongs to The Straits Times (34.9%). On the other hand, 581 articles from the dataset belongs to the official GE website, Channelnewsasia.com (65.1%). Also from table 7.3 we can see that from the valid cases, 17 articles (21.3%)comes from The Straits Times and 63 articles come from the
Channelnewsasia.com website (78.8%).
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Frequency of each article topics
Table 7.4Topic
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent
The frequency of the topics coded in the relevant dataset as seen in table 7.4 are clarification and rebuttal (value 1) with a total of 55 articles (68.8%), PAP election strategy (value 2) in 3 articles (3.8%), PAP reforms and promises (value 3) in 14 articles (17.5%) and others (value 4), which are articles that do not fall into either of the 3 topics mention, in 8 articles (10%).
Frequency of each treatment of story
Table 7.5Treatment of story
Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent
From table 7.5, the majority of the stories are general news with a total of 79 articles (98.8%). Only one article (1.3%) is coded as commentary/critique.
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Types of issues being addressed
The type of issues being addressed was also summed up to look for the issue that was largely targeted by the PAP. Table 7.6 shows that the cost of living was the biggest issue addressed by the PAP when attempting to restore their image, with a total of 57 cases. This is followed by the category others at 30 cases, which includes issues not mentioned previously in our research. The category others is split into others and others 2 which is used when more than one “others” is present in the article. Therefore this 30 cases only means that there are 30
instances of other issues being mentioned but it does not gives us the total number of the “other”
issues that were coded. The issues housing and immigration are then 28 cases and 27 cases respectively.
To provide more detail into the 30 articles that had other issues being mentioned, Table 7.7 then illustrates the different issues that were brought up during this election that were not part of the three main issues mentioned.
Table 7.6
Issues Being Addressed
N Minimum Maximum Sum
Issue being addressed -
immigration 80 0 1 27
Issue being addressed -
Cost of living 80 0 1 57
Issue being addressed -
housing 80 0 1 28
Issue being addressed -
others 80 0 1 30
Valid N (listwise) 80
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to table 7.7, the most commonly issue that the PAP also dealt with is the escape of Mas Salamat, a terrorist figure. This is followed by education policies and the flooding of Orchard Road in 2010 and 2011 which were both addressed 4 times. The issue of Singapore’s aging population, the building of the 2 casinos, the danger of having only one dominant party, elderly care, the government’s over focus of manufacturing, the issue of jobs, transport problems and healthcare were each addressed 2 times. The issue of CPF, Singapore’s economical competitiveness, PAP’sTable 7.7
Others
Total
Others:
Aging population 2
Casino 2
CPF 1
Danger of one dominant party 2
Economic competitiveness 1
Education 4
Elderly care 2
Emotionless Policies 1
Orchard Flooding 4
Foreign Mp's 1
Government over focus on
manufacturing 2
Helping the young and old 1
Jobs 2
Mas Salamat 5
Teacher pupil ratio 1
Tin pei ling 1
Too high a defense budget 1
Transport 2
Health Care 2
Singaporeans fussy with jobs 1
Limited land space 1
Total 38
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emotionless policies, the use of foreign MP’s, the helping of the old and young, the ratio of teachers and pupils in school, the high defense budget, Singaporean’s being fussy with jobs and the limited land space in Singapore were also each addressed once in the coded dataset.
4.2 Answering the research question
RQ 1: Using Benoit’s Image Restoration theory as a framework, what response strategies were used by the PAP during the period leading up to the GE?
RQ 1 seeks to understand the type of strategies used by the PAP in regards to this issue during this election. The strategies are coded based on the description and understanding of Benoit’s Image restoration strategies. Tables 8.1 provide information regarding the usage of each image restoration strategy as well as the total sum of the each strategy used.
Table 8.1
Issues and type of strategies used
Cases Denial Shifting the blame Defeasibility Accident Provocation Good intentions Bolstering Minimization Differentiation Transcendence Attack theAccuser Compensation CorrectiveAction Mortification
Immigration 27 3 3 2 0 0 8 1
4
2 1 4 3 0 9 3
Cost of living 57 2 8 2 0 0 5 3
2
2 0 9 13 9 28 4
Housing 28 2 4 3 0 0 5 1
5
3 0 4 6 0 16 4
Others 1 29 1 0 1 0 0 3 1
3
3 0 5 2 0 12 5
Others 2 10 1 0 1 0 0 1 6 0 0 2 1 0 5 4
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Total 80 9 15 9 0 0 22 8
0
10 1 24 25 9 70 20
Based on Tables 8.1, we can then answer RQ1 of this research paper. The results from the content analysis have shown that the PAP has used all but accident as an image restoration theory when attempting to repair their image during the 2011 GE.
RQ 2: What was the most commonly used strategy?
From the Table 8.1 above, we can see that the most commonly used strategies are
bolstering and corrective action. In repairing their image, the PAP used a total of 80 instances of bolstering followed by 70 instances of corrective action. Attack the accuser is the third most commonly used strategy at a total sum of 25 instances and this is followed closely by the used of transcendence, good intentions and mortification at a sum of 24, 23 and 20 respectively. The strategy shifting the blame then had a total sum of 15 instances. The strategies denial,
defeasibility and compensation were each used a total of 9 times, minimization was used 10 times and differentiation, was the least commonly used strategies at 2 and there was no use of
provocation and accident as a strategy by the PAP.
RQ 3.1: Did the PAP choose more accommodative strategies in dealing with the issues?
Base on Coomb’s clustering of strategies base on their how accommodative they are as seen in Table 3.2, we can thus decipher how accommodative PAP was in dealing with the issues.
Based on Coomb’s accommodative to non-accommodative strategies, rebuild crisis response strategies (compensation, apology) are the most accommodative, followed by bolstering crisis
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response strategies (reminder), diminish response strategies (excuse, justification) and lastly deny response strategies (denial, attack the accuser, scapegoating). Thus, as seen while answering RQ2.1, the use of bolstering and corrective action was the most at 80 and 70 respectively, fitting into Coomb’s spectrum of highly accommodative strategies. The use of other accommodative strategies like transcendence, good intentions and mortification was also often used with a sum of 24, 23 and 20 respectively. Other than the high use of attack the accuser (non-accommodative strategy), the use of other non-accommodative strategies like denial and shifting the blame is lower at 9 and 15 respectively as compared to the accommodative strategies. Thus to answer RQ3.1, the PAP did indeed use a more accommodative strategy in dealing with the three issues.
RQ3.2: What strategy/ies was/were used in regards to the unhappiness of Singaporeans with the immigration policy?
Looking once again at Table 8.1, the PAP, in dealing with the issue of immigration, most commonly used bolstering, which was used in 14 instances. This is followed by corrective action and good intentions at 11 and 9 instances respectively. The strategy transcendence was used in 4 instances. The use of denial, shifting the blame, attack the accuser and mortification were all used in 3 instances. Differentiation was used in 2 instances followed by minimization and provocation in 1 instance.
The results showed that for immigration, the PAP used all the strategies other than accident, provocation and compensation, which we have established earlier. The use of denial by the PAP is usually accompanied by statistics and figures to back up their denial. The first use of denial as a strategy was on 29th April when Minister Mentor (MM) Lee Kwan Yew denies the claims that foreigners are taking away jobs. He cited examples of how employment rose by 34%
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between 2006 and 2010 and how half of the 115900 jobs added were filled by Singaporeans while the reminding jobs wen to foreigners as the PAP has created more jobs then Singaporeans could fill (Ramesh, 2011). The PAP also strongly denied that they are looking out for foreigners more than they are for Singaporeans and that Singaporeans are now considered 2nd class citizens.
The PAP cited examples of how the jobs going to the foreigners are usually jobs that Singaporeans do not want to do and also that these foreigners usually leave after their
employment pass is due. Also, the PAP cited examples of how a company must have a certain amount of locals before they can hire foreigners thus protecting the employment of Singaporeans.
When using shifting the blame, the PAP pushed the blame of immigration to firstly the Singaporeans themselves and secondly to the competition globally. In regards to immigration woes, the PAP pushed the blame to Singaporeans for their low fertility rate and also how
Singaporeans are the ones who are not willing to wait for housing and also not willing to do low end jobs but yet kept pushing the blame to foreign immigration. The PAP also shifted the blame of the woes of foreigners fighting for jobs with Singaporeans by blaming the global phenomenon and how it is the foreigners in other parts of the world that are competing with Singaporeans and not those that are in Singapore, thus shifting the blame to foreigners outside of Singapore.
Defeasibility was used by the PAP when Prime Minister (PM) Lee Hsien Loong held a rally on 4th of May and said that the issue of immigration and housing were things that that they were not able to predict. PM Lee said, “ the world is undergoing “very rapid and massive changes ... and, very often, we have to add to incomplete information or under uncertain
conditions” (Leong, 2011, para. 7). PM Lee claimed that the economy’s sudden recovery resulted in the shortage of flats and the growth in Singapore’s economy also meant that they had to bring in more foreigners to support the investments. These were things that were beyond their control.
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The use of good intentions on the issue of immigration was mainly to justify the need of foreigners in Singapore. The biggest used of this strategy is on how stopping foreigners from entering Singapore would result in the lost of foreign investments and the moving of Multi-national companies away from Singapore thus resulting in the lost of jobs and potential incomes.
The PAP emphasizes that factories will shut down and jobs will be lost if they were to tighten the immigration policies. The second use of this strategy is on how these foreigners (blue collars) are doing jobs that Singaporeans do not want to do and without them, constructions and other heavy jobs would not be done. Thus to join in the “worldwide competition for growth and progress”
(Chan & Chan, 2011, para. 10) the government has good intentions for allowing foreigners into Singapore.
The use of bolstering on immigration was the highest at 14 counts. The main type of bolstering use was on the generic achievement of the PAP over the years and how the current Singapore got to where it is today because of the PAP. However specific bolstering on the issue of immigration is seen when PM Lee bolstered the image of the PAP by saying that the PAP has
The use of bolstering on immigration was the highest at 14 counts. The main type of bolstering use was on the generic achievement of the PAP over the years and how the current Singapore got to where it is today because of the PAP. However specific bolstering on the issue of immigration is seen when PM Lee bolstered the image of the PAP by saying that the PAP has