Skip to main content
Similar results

Cultural Education and the Public Image of Rural Areas (KUBILARI II) - Media Coverage of Neusalza-Spremberg

Public attitudes, media coverage and House of Commons debates on salient policy issues: immigration, defence and environment, 1994-2014

Media Analysis (MA 93, Print Media)

Media Analysis (MA 95, Print Media)

Media Analysis (MA 88, Print Media)

Access studyView JSONBack
Summary information

Study title

Print media coverage of public service corporations

Creator

Greasley, S, University of Exeter

Study number / PID

852690 (UKDA)

10.5255/UKDA-SN-852690 (DOI)

Data access

Open

Series

Not available

Abstract

The data is a daily time-series of print media coverage of three publicly listed corporations which have specialised to some extent in competing for government contracts. The three companies are Capita PLC, Serco PLC and G4S PLC. The data covers the period from January 1 2005 to June 30 2015. Each entry is an article with information on date, source, number of company mentions, and a human coded measure of article sentiment.

Public Service Corporations (PSCs) such as Serco, Capita and G4S are large businesses that are relatively specialised in the delivery of public services. They have been subject to very little direct analysis by policy scholars and this project starts to fill that gap. Over recent years there have been a number of contract failures for example relating to the Olympic security contract, GP out of hours services, allegations of abuse of inmates in immigration detention centres and overcharging on contracts for prisoner tagging. Such failures damage companies’ reputations and may hurt their hopes of further public contracts. This project will analyse the effect on PSC share prices of public scrutiny of failures and controversies. Responsiveness of PSC share price to public scrutiny may constitute a new type of political accountability, giving the corporations incentive to improve performance, or at least avoid public scandal. The effect of public scrutiny on share price may also shape the strategic relationship between Government and its large contractors.

Topics

Politics

Keywords

NEWSPAPERSBUSINESSESPUBLIC SERVICES2017

Methodology

Data collection period

Not available

Country

United Kingdom

Time dimension

Not available

Analysis unit

Text unit

Universe

Not available

Sampling procedure

Not available

Kind of data

Numeric

Data collection mode

Newspaper articles were downloaded from the Nexis database.The search terms specified two or more mentions of the company or the company name featured in the article title. For G4S, the terms Securicor and Group 4 were also searched because the start of the research period coincides with their merger.A subset of publications were selected for coding and data was entered directly into a spread sheet.Duplicate articles were excluded, as were sponsored articles, and a large number of false positives for the Capita search term and the Group 4 term. We also excluded articles related to security van robberies (mostly associated with the Securicor search term).

Funding information

Grant number

SG142072

Access

Publisher

UK Data Service

Publication year

2017

Terms of data access

The Data Collection is available to any user without the requirement for registration for download/access.

Related publications

Not available