Eesti ja eestlaste kujutamine Helsingin Sanomates aastatel 2006 ja 2009

The Image of Estonia and Estonians in Helsingin Sanomat in 2006 and 2009 The goal of this bachelor’s thesis was to find out what and how was written about Estonia and Estonians in newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in 2006 and 2009. Thesis’ theoretical basis was social space and representation and stereotypes. Social space in this thesis was in the context of what kind of image has been created through one of the most read newspapers in Finland. I wanted to find out what kind of picture will form through HS. The part of representation and stereotypes for example showed the meaning of language and culture for this research. Language made it possible to both read and analyse the articles. The cultural aspect comes from the fact, that the author is familiar both Finnish and Estonian cultures. The relevance of stereotypes in this thesis is how people see some nationalities and countries with a help of certain stereotypes, whether acknowledging that or not. In this case it is done by both the readers of HS, but more or less by the authors of the articles of HS. Review of relationship between Finland and Estonia gave thesis a background. When characterising countries relations it came clear, that the countries have a long shared history in both national and personal level. That helped seeing why this research and its theme could be essential and interesting. The review of Helsingin Sanomat was important because you couldn’t assume, that the newspaper would be known and familiar by all the Estonians. When comparing this thesis to the earlier researches it came clear, that the research done five years ago by Katri Sipilä was similar with this thesis, but there were found some differences too. First difference was in the time period and the second from the fact, that Sipilä concentrated on paper version of HS and this thesis concentrated on the online version. Use of online articles in this thesis turned out to be useful to find various aspects. For example in the year 2006 HS still used same articles in their paper version and online version. Use of the quantitative content analysis turned out to be useful in this thesis. That was the most effective way to analyse such big amount of articles, that existed for this research. Especially the decoding instruction helped a lot while doing the analysis. The author finds that the decoding instruction could have been even more extensive. Maybe through that it could have been possible to find even more accurate and clearer results. At the same time it could have changed the research more unclear. While doing the qualitative content analysis it helped a lot, that the quantitative content analysis had done a lot of needed pre-work. It made the qualitative content analysis and finding the discourses a lot easier. While finding the discourses the most helpful thing among other criteria was, that the articles were already familiar to the author, thanks to the quantitative content analysis. Author already had some kind of overview of the articles, so the research didn’t has to start from zero. There became a preparatory picture of Estonia and Estonians in HS after the quantitative content analysis. Some parts of decoding instruction’s results didn’t directly give much to the research except for basic statistics. It for example came clear, that there are lots of articles in the theme of Estonia and Estonians and the perspective was mostly from the angle of Finland and Finnish people. That was seen for example in spatial context and the subjects of the article. It was also found in the results, that Estonia is close and important to Finland. The results of the discourse analysis gave deepened the image of Estonia and Estonians. The found discourses gave a picture, where it was possible to see the co-operation between Finland and Estonia – in sickness and in health. It was also found that the relationship between the two countries is not without conflicts: bad behaviour of Finnish tourists in Tallinn, Estonian workers in Finland taking the Finnish jobs and the criticism against the neighbour country by both Estonians and Finnish. Those were the problems that were found while doing the analysis. There wasn’t found any big difference between the two years. Although economic crisis and other things effected the results, both years had certain themes similar. The relationship between Finland and Estonia is definitely close and both of the countries has a lot of interest towards the other.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4037717*es