How To Operationalize Climate Change Coverage And Mental Health

Topic: Quantitative study focusing on gender in global media. Please note: a social/global concern can be linked with other socially defining factor(s), such as race, ethnicity, age, class, of  your choice as well.

Step by step:

1. What, in your view, is one of the most pressing concerns of our time? For example, climate change/gender-based violence? Read Treadwell chapters for quantitative research and decide on the topic that is feasible to subject to study quantitatively. For example, climate change coverage and its impact on mental health? Or gender-based violence in the news in the US versus a non-Western country of your choice?
2. Conduct a scholarly literature search on the topic of your choice to explore how other scholars have approached it. Reference the sources to discuss the theoretical background of your project and refine and justify your own disposition.
3. Formulate a research question/interest of your own, and a hypothesis. For example, what is the impact of climate change media coverage on mental health of the millennials and the elderly? Hypothesis: The magnitude of climate change coverage increases anxiety and stress experienced by both the millennials and the elderly. OR Who speaks about gender-based violence in the news media in a Western versus non-Western news outlet? Hypothesis: The status of women in a specific country has a relationship with who appears as a subject, victim, or survivor in the news in the context of gender-based violence.
4. Decide on methodological tools: for example, decide how to operationalize climate change coverage and mental health (anxiety and stress); how to make them measurable? For the independent variable (media coverage), you could draw upon existing literature, and design a survey to measure its link with aspects of mental health (dependent variable) OR you could design and conduct a content analysis of media coverage to establish the fact that climate change coverage has increased over the past years, and then design a survey to address the link between the independent and dependent variable (mental health).For gender-based violence, decide what constitutes gender-based violence in the news, e.g. femicide, technological abuse, sexual assaults etc. Once you have identified your keywords, news outlets to be included, the sample, and finally, the stories that you will include in your study, code each observation to a code in alignment with quantitative content analysis standards. Process, analyze, present, and discuss the data.

5. Revisit your hypothesis to prove, revise, or reject it. For example, extensive climate change coverage increases anxiety and stress more among the millennials than the elderly. If this is the case, how to address and exclude other possible reasons for your findings, e.g. the assumption that perhaps the elderly are equally, if not more, worried about it than the millennials, but just do not talk about it? And about the gender-based violence, for example: hypothesis rejected because the global “me too” movement brought the countries closer together in their ways of addressing gender-based violence, at least momentarily.
6. Summarize and discuss your findings in your report (appr. 7 pages, 1,5 spaced). The report explains the research process from beginning to an end in detail. The paper should include a scholarly section focusing on the background of the topic, explanation of the key terms, and quantitative method used for collecting and analyzing data, description, justification, and analysis of original or secondary data, presentation and discussion of research results, and a conclusion.