Themes and Visual Elements in News Imagery about Climate Change: Codebook

This is the codebook we developed and used for content analysis described in

Rebich-Hespanha, S., Rice, R.E., Montello, D.R., Retzloff, S., Tien, S., and Hespanha, J.P. (2015) Image Themes and Frames in U.S. Print News Stories about Climate Change, Environmental Communication, 9(4), 491-519. doi:10.1080/17524032.2014.983534.

This codebook was first published online at http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/emi/global-climate-change-news-images in 2012.

The first column indicates a broad Category for each theme, the second column contains the Specific Theme, the third column contains a description of the Specific Theme, and the fourth column contains the sequential number for the code. Themes (specific themes) were coded based on examination of the images. Categories were used only to group specific themes for greater conceptual ease in coding the images for specific themes. The codebook contains 118 specific Themes within 19 Categories. The final Categories, Themes, and specific wording is the result of multiple codings of the 350 images (see Rebich-Hespanha & Hespanha, 2014) using 123 codes by three coders, involving over 175,000 separate codings. All of the final 118 codes exhibited excellent agreements and reliabilities (calculated reliability values reported in the Environmental Communication manuscript referenced above).

alse related:

Rebich-Hespanha, S. & Hespanha, Joao P. (2014): Metadata table for 350 images associated with 200 randomly-selected US print news stories about climate change. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1213654