Women's Issues Policy Priority Content Analysis
Description
The content was selected by visiting the government website that lists all United States Representatives of the 115th Congress. This webpage has a directory of each representative, her or his state, district, political party and contact information. By selecting the name of the congressman or congresswoman, the viewer is linked to the representative’s official webpage. Typically, each webpage will have a section that is listed as “issues” or “priorities.” This section of the website outlines priority political issues and the representative’s stance on that issue. It is from this list that the content was coded. These websites were selected because these issues are likely enduing beliefs of the representative for the foreseeable future. It is important to note that there is no limit on how many issues a representative may list on the webpage. Overall, there were 437 representatives that were active (vacant seats were not included in this study but territorial delegates were). Additionally, there were six representatives that had no information regarding their issue stance on their page. These members were also excluded from the coding process, leaving a total of 431 coded websites. Of that total, 211 were Republican men, 24 were Republican women, 65 were Democrat women, and 131 were Democrat men. Between three coders, an interrater reliability analysis was used for rater consistency (κ = .813 (p < .001) (Cohen’s Kappa). The coder completed ten percent of the original data set.
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Steps to reproduce
Items were coded by creating a spreadsheet with 25 questions. Coders were asked to view the website of each candidate and indicate descriptor variables about the representative, along with the presence of certain issues on the “issues” page. The analysis consisted of the representative’s gender, political party, and race. After this, coders identified the issues page and viewed what was listed. Coders indicated a “0” if the issue was listed and a “1” if the issue was not listed. While there were several dozen variables that were coded in the research, of special note are the coding techniques on women’s issues and abortion. Women’s issues. Women’s issues were counted as present (0) if the politician specifically listed anything related to women on their priorities page. Some examples of this included: women, women’s equality, women’s health, and women’s rights. Since abortion may be included as a women’s rights issue, the coders explored the politician’s stance on “women” to see if abortion was included in the politician’s detailed description of women’s issues. If it was, the politician was also coded as including abortion as a priority. In most other circumstances, the politicians typically defined women’s issues as topics relating to: domestic violence, fair pay, health, or family leave. For the analysis below, it is important to note that this variable is the working definition for women’s issues. Meaning, the conclusions from this study do not account for education, healthcare, and civil rights and the other traditionally definitions used to measure women’s issues (found in the introduction). Abortion. Abortion was another variable that was coded in this research. As stated above, it was sometimes listed in the women’s issue’s category, but not often. If that was the case, abortion was still counted as present in this study. Additionally, this item was considered to be present if the priority page listed phrases such as: family values, women’s choice, pro-life, or anything else of that nature. Politicians rarely label the issue as “abortion,” but rather the core value that undergirds the debate (such as “right to life” or “women’s reproductive rights”). Women’s issues broadly defined. As stated previously, the conventional way of measuring women’s issues includes: healthcare, education, women specific issues, abortion, family and civil rights, seniors, social services and ethics/government reform. Each of these items were also coded in the analysis in order to compare the traditional measure for women’s issues with this articles working definition of women’s issues. There is only one research question (R3) that relies on this definition of women’s issues. In all other circumstances, women’s issues are defined strictly as the listing of women’s issues on one’s page.
Institutions
- Washington State University