Methodological Approach and Methods

How does news media framing of Indigenous politics differ between hard and soft rights issues? What implications do these differences have for the politics of reconciliation in Canada? This chapter sets out the methodological approach used to answer these research questions. The chapter begins by explaining the procedures used for case selection and sampling. These procedures focused on selecting cases that were both theoretically relevant to the conceptual divide between hard and soft rights issues, as well as cases that were empirically significant within the time-period of my study. Similar approaches to sampling were used to collect news articles across the three case studies with some relative differences in the number of publications and articles selected. Following this discussion, the chapter unpacks the methodological approach used to analyze the selected news articles in the study. The book relies on a mixed-method approach combining frame and content analysis. The frame analysis takes an interpretivist approach focused on identifying issue-specific frames across the three case studies. Complementing this approach, a content analysis has also been performed focused on sourcing, empirical contextualization and references to relevant historical issues. In line with the identification of issue-specific frames, a unique coding framework has been developed for each of the three cases. The chapter concludes by discussing the key methodological limitations of this study, in particular the absence of interviews or surveys capable of probing into media production.