In the first six months of POWER, the consortium has been working hard on the research element of the project. Thiago Santos from Sport Evolution Alliance spoke about what has been done.
“In the first half a year, the research team made significant progress in building a solid foundation for evidence-based analysis of the portrayal of women athletes in sports media. Key milestones include the completion of the bibliometric analysis and literature review, the development of a shared methodology across all partner countries and the launch of the national-level diagnosis, contextualising gender inequalities in each participating country’s sports media landscape. We also finalised the tools for data collection and conducted national focus groups.”
Sharing some figures about the data collection, he added, “In the focus groups a total of 60 participants took part, ten from each partner country. Participants included athletes, coaches, journalists, media professionals and psychologists, among other relevant stakeholders. Regarding the media content analysis, each partner analysed 20 days for two general and two sport-specific newspapers, ten days for two online sport magazines, 20 days for two TV channels featuring news programmes and 30 days for two X profiles of relevant news outlets. Altogether, over 1000 pieces of data were collected across X, newspapers, online magazines and TV programmes.
“We also designed a survey for our quantitative study. With that, we will assess how portrayals of women athletes impact audience perceptions. We expect approximately 720 responses to the survey across the consortium”, he added.
There have been some challenges to the research process along the way. Santos explained some of them, “It was challenging to harmonise the methodology across diverse media systems and languages, which is important to ensure comparability. We also found it difficult to access older media content, but we overcame it by allowing the use of PDF versions.”
Talking about the next steps in research, Santos said, “The next six months will focus on completing and integrating the final phases of the research. In the summer, we will draft the national reports, peer review them and finalise them. They will be merged into our EU-level research report. In the autumn, we will use the research results in communication and training materials and present our results in an international congress and other dissemination events.”
Follow the POWER social media channels — X, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin — for more updates.
