A Technique for Describing Community Structure Through Newspaper Analysis

ed from newspaper items, since one criterion of selection of data was family roles reported in the record of an event. Obviously newspaper reports which are made amenable to a standardized, clerical manipulation will reveal the content of familial roles in only a limited degree. If all newspaper items containing references to family life, including news stories, were made the subject of a broader content analysis, perhaps a fuller picture of familial roles within the community structure could be developed. However, such a method would not provide the standardized inventory of news items which was the goal of this project. The present method itself gives a varied picture of events and situations which involve familial roles as indicated in Table 3. Three kinds of familial roles appear involved in the classes of events shown in Table 3: (1) roles within the nuclear family, (2) kinship roles between nuclear families and/or separate individuals, and (3) nonkinship roles between nuclear families and/or separate individuals. In some cases the event reported did not involve immediate participation in the role, but simply recorded that a person had played it. Such a case would be an obituary which might describe a man as a father, husband, brother, etc., while the event of death itself did not involve playing these roles. In another case, such as a wedding shower, a woman might be described as actually playing the role, often a nonkinship relation between two families. The variety of social situations in which such TABLE 3. DISTRIBUTION OF EVENTS SHOWING FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS AND INTERACTIONS AS REPORTED IN TWO ILLINI CITY NEWSPAPERS, JANUARY-OCTOBER, 1949 Type of Event Number Funerals and obituaries 258 Parties and luncheons 160 Weddings 135 Dinners and dances 102 Visits by or entertainment of house guests 86 Showers 61 Christenings or baby-namings 55 Birthday parties 38 Wedding anniversaries 28 Teas 18 Miscellaneous 37 Total 978 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.223 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 06:02:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms DESCRIBING COMMUNITY STRUCTURE THROUGH NEWSPAPER ANALYSIS 105 roles were reported and their relative frequency appear to be roughly as follows: About one-third of the events were initiated by marriage-its anticipation, its actual celebration, or its memorialization. About one-quarter of the events involved death of a family member and activities associated with the funeral, burial, or attendance upon the bereaved family. Approximately one-sixth of the news items concerned recognition of birth or aging. The largest residual set of activities, notably dinners and parties, appeared to be reciprocal interaction of an informal sort between families. The remaining activities involved a variety of roles such as reunions, entertaining old friends or college friends, farewell parties for departing residents, etc. It may be that in some of these cases involving friends that the roles being played were not familial but rather of an individual nature such as those involved in friendship. In general, however, these activities would appear to represent patterned roles within the community social structure as they relate nuclear families to each other. The tabulation is an inventory of the kinds of situations for which such roles are given local public recognition through the medium of the newspaper. The news reports of these activities appear to be a public image the people of Illini City have of local social structure as a set of interactions within and between family units; otherwise it would seem unlikely that the readers of the newspapers would be able to see the reported roles as topics of interest whose nature they comprehended. Insofar as a basic component of community structure is patterned interactions between separate family groups, newspaper data give a picture of the forms, frequencies and variety of such interaction. ASSOCIATIONAL PARTICIPATION AND ACTIVITIES A second component of the social structure of a community is the number of formal organizations, their membership, and activities. The newspapers of Illini City supplied a large amount of information about this aspect of the local social structure, since 499 such organizations were mentioned during the period studied. This number, in itself, was remarkable since it was twice as large as any other list available from sources in the community, and it indicates the magnitude of associational life in a midwestern community. There is not for associations, as for families, an independent measure, such as the U. S. Census, of the total universe of associations in the community from which the sample mentioned in the newspaper is drawn. However, it can be assumed that these 499 organizations represent a much higher proportion of the total number of associations than the 30 percent sample of families drawn from the universe of families estimated by U. S. Census interviewers. Since organizations by their nature have a more public character than average families and since organizations represent a much larger membership than families, it might be surmised that newspaper mentions, if they covered a sufficient time period, would tend toward exhaustive coverage of the number of formal associations. If social organizations are regarded as another basic component of local social structure, the interest in such organizations of a community concerns their number, the prevailing types, the memberships and their activities. With respect to membership it was unfortunate that most mentions of associational events rarely gave information on memberships beyond the officers or participants in a particular event. It was, therefore, impossible to make an accurate estimate of the size or the class level of membership of various organizations, or of the overlapping in membership that might have suggested a sociometric picture of community life. The usefulness of the associational data seemed to rest in the measure of the number and types of associations found in a medium-sized midwestern city. Newspaper information permits only a broad, empirical classification of associations by their apparent functional types. It appears probable that a more sophisticated classification based on activity-elements and ritual as suggested by Warner4 can be achieved only by direct observation or interview. However, an institutionally descriptive classification gives a good picture of the areas of community life in which there is the greatest associational activity. Such a picture is presented in Table 4. This table reveals that in Illini City the most prevalent formal organizations are of the benevolent-fraternal type exemplified by the Moose, Elks, Royal Neighbors, Eastern Star, Woodmen of America, etc. Practically equal in number are social-recreational groupings such as sewing circles, garden clubs, bridge clubs, country clubs, hobby clubs, neighborhood organizations with social purposes, etc. A third large set are religious groups. 4W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),