4. Methodology, Research Question and Hypothesis

The primal objective of this thesis is to find out how the media trend changed over the Syrian refugee crisis based on BBC website news headlines. For attain the goal, three incidents related Syrian refugees are taken up as pivotal events which altered the tide of public sentiments. Those targeted episodes are "September 2nd 2015 Death of Alan Kurdi", "November 2015 Paris attacks" and "2016 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany". The investigation was made into the media trend over the period from June, 2015 to April, 2016 so that the survey term can cover all the tragedies.

In terms of the research techniques, there are already some methods to analyze the media trend from news coverages. For example, NET-Tone indicator which is introduced by Erik Bleich and his team is a quite efficient way to calculate the emotions of the news titles. Initially, this technics was considered as a main analysis method for this exploration. However, as the research progressed, some problems began to appear. The most serious issue was that getting the proper assessment for "positive" headlines was much harder than expected as proved in the previous section. Without the precise perception for "positive" elements, the credibility of "Net-tone" would be damaged tremendously.

As a result, this time, we decided to create the original simple procedure for this thesis to calculate the index which focus only on negative value. First of all, 50 titles of the suitable BBC articles from June, 2015 to April, 2016 were collected every two months. Secondly, every news headlines were split into three categories "positive", "negative" and "neutral" by the three programs. After that, from the result, only the extreme “negative” headlines which all three software indicate them as negative were counted for every selected month. In the end, those outcomes were compared with each other and other information so as to unravel the movement of the media trend. Some people might think that the number of the samples are too small in order to calculate the emotional value. However, given the fact that Nielsen Media Research has used only 5,000 households to calculate the nearly 100 million American’s TV viewing rate precisely for many years, the sample number of 50 headlines for each month would not be so small (Eric T. Olson & Tammy Perry Olson, 2000, p. 14).

The research questions for this thesis is “How have the public reactions changed as the trends of the media coverages have shifted?” The hypothesis for this query is that the increase of the news reports which contains negative elements towards the refugees will contributed the deterioration of their public image.