A method for content analysis applied to newspaper coverage of Japanese personalities in Brazil and Portugal

Abstract

This article reports a study that compared how Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers covered Japan in the 90s. The research was based on 9,152 texts related to Japan published in a Portuguese and a Brazilian newspaper from that era. This is a much larger sample than what was used in existing text content analysis studies for Portuguese. To treat this large sample, selected concordances and distributions obtained from the corpora were semi-automatically analyzed. Results revealed that the most referred Japanese personalities were politicians. Additionally, in general,...

Abstract

This article reports a study that compared how Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers covered Japan in the 90s. The research was based on 9,152 texts related to Japan published in a Portuguese and a Brazilian newspaper from that era. This is a much larger sample than what was used in existing text content analysis studies for Portuguese. To treat this large sample, selected concordances and distributions obtained from the corpora were semi-automatically analyzed. Results revealed that the most referred Japanese personalities were politicians. Additionally, in general, there are more texts related to Japan (and naming Japanese personalities) in the Portuguese newspaper than in the Brazilian newspaper. The study focused on personalities for which there are statistically significant frequency differences in the Portuguese and the Brazilian newspapers. A detailed analysis of the texts where these personalities were named revealed events related to Japan with different impact in Portugal and Brazil.