Major
Psychology
Anticipated Graduation Year
2022
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
After the globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, large-scale discourse on criminal justice system operations and mobilization for criminal justice reform has become increasingly prevalent in online spaces. The average online news consumer is more likely to form an opinion purely based on an article’s headline rather than the article’s content as well. This study’s content analysis aims to document and categorize the headline representation of Cook County Correctional System operations by popular local news source The Chicago Sun-Times. Cook County Corrections hosts one of the world's largest singular jail sites in Cook County Jail, and Chicago has been a major protest site for movements against police brutality. Current analysis aims to categorize headlines from most negative to most positive as well as by focus categories in order to observe trends and differences in reporting over time about certain criminal justice topics. Although this research is ongoing, preliminary observations suggest results consistent with expectations of increasingly negative headlines over time as well as distinctly different distributions of Cook County Corrections reporting data during 2020, the year of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Jane Neal, Department of Psychology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Content Analysis of Cook County Correctional System News Coverage by the Chicago Sun-Times
After the globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, large-scale discourse on criminal justice system operations and mobilization for criminal justice reform has become increasingly prevalent in online spaces. The average online news consumer is more likely to form an opinion purely based on an article’s headline rather than the article’s content as well. This study’s content analysis aims to document and categorize the headline representation of Cook County Correctional System operations by popular local news source The Chicago Sun-Times. Cook County Corrections hosts one of the world's largest singular jail sites in Cook County Jail, and Chicago has been a major protest site for movements against police brutality. Current analysis aims to categorize headlines from most negative to most positive as well as by focus categories in order to observe trends and differences in reporting over time about certain criminal justice topics. Although this research is ongoing, preliminary observations suggest results consistent with expectations of increasingly negative headlines over time as well as distinctly different distributions of Cook County Corrections reporting data during 2020, the year of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.