Teachers’ Strike in Media Messages of the Polish Teachers’ Union (Związek Nauczycielstwa Polskiego) on Twitter

Rafał Paradowski

Abstract


This article presents an attempt to adapt new research techniques in the field of small & big data to the analysis of social phenomena. This task was carried out on the example of media communication conducted by the Polish Teachers' Union (ZNP) on Twitter during the preparation and realisation of the teachers' strike in 2019. The strike was widely commented in traditional media and on internet social networks, and the spontaneity of the discussion and the involvement of the general public blurred the information message of each party, making it difficult to objectively assess this social phenomenon. The main research problem has been reduced to the question about the elementary contents that make up the ZNP’s media message addressed to the public. The detailed questions concerned: the most frequently discussed topics in the discourse, slogans proclaimed by members of the union and the position that students and state exams have in the messages. The analytical part was based on text mining – a method analogous to the classic content analysis, but using the small & big data possibilities. The database consisted of 488 unique tweets gathered from three official ZNP’s Twitter accounts for the period 2019-01-01–2019-04-23. The study assumed that the frequency of keywords or particular topics in posts should correlate positively with the importance attached by the sender to the given issues. The actual survey was carried out in almost real time, i.e. over  a period of several days during the strike.     


Keywords


Twitter; small data; content analysis; teachers’ strike; media communication

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/ks.2020.8.2.91-111
Date of publication: 2021-05-18 13:49:21
Date of submission: 2021-05-17 23:36:26


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