Pick Your Time Period

Once you’ve defined your unit of analysis and your geographic scope, it’s important to clarify your time period.

Over what length of time are you interested in studying journalism employment? Are you most interested in recent trends to the profession or do you want to understand how certain flashpoints or critical incidents — such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the introduction of artificial intelligence into the journalism labor market — have affected journalism employment? If the former, you need a baseline to work from and replicable methodologies to ensure measurement remains the same over time.

When selecting your time period, it’s important to keep your study purpose and your research questions front and center as these will inform your selection.

When selecting your time period, it’s important to keep your study purpose and your research questions front and center as these will inform your selection. It’s also important to keep in mind the relationship between the unit of interest and the unit of measurement (e.g., the relationship between bylines collected in a discrete period of time and what they imply for the number of journalists who are working in that time period). This helps  to ensure continuity between the relationship of what is represented during the time period of data collection and what it implies more broadly.