European Journal of Scientific Research - EuroJournals

Comparative Analysis of Pictorial Coverage of Events by Pakistan’s English Press 751
period will also help to know the innovations the New Year has brought for the readers. Considering
the requirement of the present study and for meaningful inferences and deductions, the researcher has
done systematic sampling. Every third newspaper of the month is selected for the sample. In this way
total ten newspapers of one month and thirty newspapers for the whole period were selected, totaling
sixty.
Categories Selection
There are real advantages for a researcher to use a category system that has been used in other studies.
First, the researcher must know that it is a workable system. If the researcher needs to create his/her
own set of categories, the decision to create own set of categories instead of using an existing set
should be based primarily on the objectives of the study under consideration. It is mostly of limiting
the number of categories. Once coder is familiar with the set of categories, he/she should be able to
operate without frequent reference back to the list and definitions. To scientifically handle the problem
of data collection and data reduction, a coding sheet containing nine columns is created as shown
under:
Coding sheet
International National Provincial Regional
Categories* # of Space in # of Space in # of Space in # of Space in
photos cm photos cm photos cm photos cm
*: Politics, developmental affairs, economics, education, festival, technology, environment, disaster, accident, nature, war, crime, showbiz, health, weather,
protests, event, sports and others
The first column of coding sheet indicates categories; columns 2 nd and 3 rd show the number of
photographs, and the space given to events and personnel of international importance; columns 4 th and
5 th show the number of photographs and the space to events and personnel of national importance;
columns 6 th and 7 th indicate the number of photographs and space to events and personnel of provincial
importance: and columns 8 th and 9 th show the number of photographs to events and personnel of
regional importance.
Pilot Study
Pilot study is made to check how reliable the coding process is (Hansen, A. et al., 1998). Reliability in
content analysis is essentially about consistency: consistency between different coders (inter-coder
reliability), and consistency of the individual coder’s coding practice over time (intra-coder reliability).
There are several different ways of checking or measuring reliability in content analysis, from a simple
check on the percentage of coding decisions which coders agree, to more complex formulae which take
into account the degree to which a certain level of agreement would occur simply by chance in a set
number of coding decisions (pp.120-21). After developing a standardized coding sheet, initially twelve
selected newspapers are deeply observed and coded the materials in the light of the coding sheet. Four
coders (2 female and 2 male students) were properly trained and facilitated to check the authenticity of
the coding sheet and the consistency among the dimensions of the study’s main concepts. Higher
percentage of inter-coder reliability was observed. In this way, finally the required data from the
selected 60 newspapers was collected.
Findings
The results of the study reveal that both the selected leading newspapers have spared significant space
by almost all their pages the pictures of events and personnel of international, national, provincial, and
regional importance for the whole period of three months. The daily ‘Dawn’ exclusive pictorial
coverage given to the issues listed in the table 1.1 reveals that the paper has given significant
importance by both number of pictures (26) and space (2474) in centimeters to international political
events compared to its number of pictures and space devoted national, provincial and regional issues.
Significant difference is observed between the paper pictorial coverage of the events of developmental