Disability and Citizenship Studies by Marie Sépulchre

Author:Marie Sépulchre [Sépulchre, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367467265
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

4.2 Debate articles from Swedish national daily newspapers

The second set of written claims analysed in this book consists of debate articles about disability that were published in three major Swedish daily newspapers between 2008–2017. To select the debate articles, I started by identifying which national daily newspapers were most read in Sweden and found that the following daily newspapers had the widest scope, both online and in print: Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet (see Table 4.1). I selected these daily newspapers, except for Expressen, which I could not include in my analysis because this newspaper does not have a section with debate articles.

Table 4.1 Scope of the main Swedish daily newspapers for an average day of 2017

Print Digital

Aftonbladet 538,000 3,059,000

Expressen 508,000 1,968,000

Dagens Nyheter 625,000 620,000

Svenska Dagbladet 376,000 504,000

Source: Kantar SIFO (2018).

After having selected these daily newspapers, I searched their online databases for debate articles about ‘disability’. More specifically, I searched for the debate articles containing the terms ‘disability’, ‘impairment’, ‘handicap’ and ‘disabled people’.7 I selected the debate articles that were about disability and were written by disability activists, that is, members of disability organisations, people who have the experience of disability, or relatives of disabled people. I decided to include members of disability organisations and people with the experience of disability in the selection, in order to match the characteristics of the activists who wrote in the blog ‘FullParticipation.Now’. In addition, I selected the articles that were written by family members of disabled people because, when reading through the debate articles retrieved on the basis of my search for debate articles including ‘disability’ or similar terms, I noted that a number of them were written by parents or grand-parents of disabled children. Although family members of disabled children do not have a personal experience of disability as such, I decided to include their articles in my analysis because I reasoned that they represent the interests of disabled children. In contrast, I did not select the debate articles authored by people who identified themselves primarily as politicians, civil servants, medical staff, teachers or researchers – unless they mentioned having the experience of living with disability – because I reasoned that they spoke from a different standpoint. In total, 162 debate articles were selected, which corresponds to 116,510 words or 434 A4 pages (12pt). Regarding their distribution over time, Figure 4.2 shows that the number of debate articles increased over the period 2008–2017.

Figure 4.2 Number of debate articles published, 2008–17 (n = 162).

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