Migration in the Media and Public Opinion in Britain
Overview
As migration has climbed toward the top of the political agenda in Britain, the relationship between media coverage and public attitudes has become a vital question for researchers and policy-makers. Public opinion is a key justification for government policies aimed at reduced net migration. But surprisingly little is known about the roots of public opinion in information about immigration.
This project tackles this gap in the research by addressing in turn the following questions:
- How does the media portray migration?
- And how do media portrayals influence public perceptions and attitudes?
The first stage of the project will focus on the media. The aim is to construct an unbiased, efficient tool for collecting and analyzing newspaper coverage of migration. We will then use this capacity in several ways. First, we will create a comprehensive data set of news stories relating to migration. Second, we will analyse the language used to describe (im)migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Third, we will track media coverage of migration in close to “real time,” monitoring trends in the volume and tone.
The second stage of the project will link this media research with public opinion research examining how members of the public perceive immigrants. This line of research is already well underway. Blinder has led several original data collections, using surveys and controlled experiments, that have investigated implicit perceptions of immigrants and these will be built upon during this project.
Research Objectives
The project has several key research objectives, as follows:
- Develop an efficient, unbiased method for selecting, classifying, and analyzing media texts on the subject of migration. This will include development of tools usable by other academics and organizations, such as “dictionaries” modeled on the Harvard General Inquirer.
- Identify recurrent words, metaphors, themes and narratives in media coverage of migration.
- Track changes in coverage of migration over time, including trends in the volume of stories and the tone of coverage. This will include frequent if not quite “real time” updating.
- Analyse depictions of migrants, in terms of class or occupation; ethnicity; gender; reason for migrating; and legal status.
- Analyse metaphorical vocabularies used to depict or discuss migrants, such as water metaphors (e.g. “flooding”, “swamping”), armies, vermin or pests, and languages of authority and control
Methods
The proposed project will look for connections between media coverage and public opinion in two ways. Initially, we will look for parallels between media portrayals and public perceptions of immigrants. For example, we may find that asylum seekers are a focal point in both media coverage and in public perceptions of immigrants (out of proportion with their actual numbers).
Next, this preliminary work will form the basis for laboratory experiments on media effects. These experiments will test for causal impact of key media portrayals and language emerging from the media analysis in the first stage of the project.
The choice of controlled laboratory experiments is meant to maximize our ability to establish causal relationships between media coverage and public attitudes. It is often suggested that media coverage plays a significant role in shaping public opinion toward immigration, but it is rare to establish causal impact. In studies of media impact; correlation is often dismissed as the result of self-selection, in which audiences choose to read newspapers that confirm their prior views. (Meanwhile, by using the analysis of large bodies of real newspaper articles as a basis for experimental treatments, the project will avert standard criticism of lab experiments as artificial and not applicable to real-world situations.)
These lines of research have important policy implications and academic importance. We hypothesize that both media portrayals and public images of migrants will differ sharply, and in predictable ways, from the portrait of migration in official government statistics. This is a critical policy problem to identify and measure; migration as envisioned by the public and media may be quite different from “migration” as measured by the government and targeted by policy-makers. Policies are being made on the presumption that reducing “statistical migration” will satisfy the widespread opposition to “imagined migration,” or migration as envisioned by members of the public.
Outcomes
Workshops
1. Small-scale working group, 10-15 participants, Fall 2012
The aim of this workshop is the sharing of expertise among researchers from different disciplines with different approaches to the analysis of media texts.
2. Medium-sized workshop to disseminate initial findings, 25-35 participants, Spring 2013
This workshop will be organized around dissemination of research findings and methodological tools developed to date by the project. It will aim at a broader audience, including students and others at Oxford with interests in migration and/or media studies, as well as think-tanks and NGOs.
Academic publications
1. Article on media and public attitudes for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies or similar. This piece examine the parallels between media coverage and public images of migration.
2. Article on impact of media portrayals of migrants on public perceptions of migrants, based on experimental results, aimed at Public Opinion Quarterly.
Other outputs and dissemination
- A replicable methodology and a set of practical, easy-to-use tools for other academics and organisations to use in assessing discussions of migration.
- Materials for dissemination through the Migration Observatory website. Outputs disseminated through the Observatory will include:
- graphs showing changing trends in media attention to migration in general and to particular migration-related stories, including updates in “real time,”
- written briefings on basic findings about trends in themes and narratives,
- descriptive “graphics” such as word clouds or visual depictions of semantic networks,
- accompanying publicity as appropriate, through the Migration Observatory newsletter, press releases, direct contact with journalists, video or audio podcasts, and twitter.
Time line: June 2012 – May 2013, with written/website outputs to follow
Funder: Oxford University Press/John Fell Fund
Researchers: Scott Blinder
Links:
Public Opinion and Public Policy - Migration Observatory video interview with Scott Blinder
Thinking Behind the Numbers - ESRC video on public opinion toward immigration in Britain with Scott Blinder