Studying Global News: Methodological Issues

This paper reports on the processes, challenges, and results of a study of news consumers in 16 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. This study employed a 10-minute, online survey measuring media consumption, news topic preference, news values and demographic information. The results of the primary study will be reported in later papers; the purpose of this analysis is to address the issues and challenges in conducting cross-national research, including language and idiom, sampling issues, data collection procedures, incentives, and time. The analysis begins with a brief overview of methodology, followed by discussion of each of these issues