>> home
>> research > fields > INTAS
Tolerance and Intolerance in the Post-Soviet Press:
Applying New Methods of Measurement and Evaluation
European project sponsored by INTAS (May 2005-April 2007)
supervised by Howard Davis (University of Wales, Bangor, UK)
Xavier Giró Martí (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Johannes Angermüller (Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany)
Research team:
European University at St. Petersburg, Russia
Institute of Sociology, Moscow, Russia
Social Fund Resource Center of Samarkand Region, Uzbekistan
Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan
Organization of Social Sciences Teachers, Russia
The key themes of the project are tolerance and intolerance in the recent post-
Soviet press (in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). The
research addresses the topic of identities in transformation and responds to
current concerns about the rise of racism and ethnic discrimination in public
communication, aiming to provide an objective basis for evaluating the
performance of a broadly representative sample of periodicals. It builds on the
achievements of recent research on the media and ethnic relations by the 5 NIS
members of the consortium, including the RF Ministry of Education initiative on
tolerance. The proposed project follows on from debates about theory and method
generated in this framework and aims to break new ground in terms of the theory
of tolerance, the scope of the research, methods of analysis and application to the
practice of journalism. Tolerance is assumed to be revealed through mutual
recognition and access to the understanding of different worldviews in the context
of common rights and if any of these components are absent there is a risk of
intolerance. The methodology reflects this by treating all expressions relating to
the ‘Other’ as relevant data, not simply those which are extreme or overtly racist.
The research design will include the following steps: the creation of a comparative
database using common software, an inventory of the main thematic fields of
ethno-cultural representation, a quantitative analysis of formal text characteristics,
a qualitative interpretation of the language of difference and expressions of the
‘Other’, and the construction of indices of tolerance and intolerance (TI) for each
publication. The analysis will be innovative in a number of ways: the sample will include the press in Russian and other languages (Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek and
Tadzhik) not so far studied in a comparative framework; secondly, the contrast
between capitals and regions, a key issue in the federal and NIS context, will be
made explicit; thirdly, it will combine quantitative and qualitative data; and fourthly
it will bring together the multidisciplinary expertise of the partners from INTAS as
well as the NIS (in social and political sciences, language and interaction, and
journalism). The make-up of the consortium is designed to bring new expertise in
text description, discourse analysis and membership categorization analysis to
bear on the research questions. The policy objective of the project is to use the
results to deliver a scientifically sound and replicable methodological instrument in
the form of simplified ‘TI indices’ for the comparative evaluation of press
performance. These outcomes will be disseminated to journalism researchers,
editors and other professionals in the field, including NGOs active in
communications and human right issues.
|