Note in particular the new section “Resources for teachers” where we will put presentations from the project. Of particular interest here should be a new presentation of results from the 2008-survey, which includes national comparisions of all the major variables in the survey and some selected slides on differences between the sexes. The presentation is available as a PDF, either in a full-color, full-page verison or in a more printer-friendly version with no backgrounds and two slides per page:

Terzis, Georgios (2009).  European Journalism Education. Bristol, Intellect Books/UCP.

Average response rates for the countries were: 39% (Finland), 58% (Sweden), 67% (Norway) and 48% (Denmark). In particular, two schools contribute a lot to the relative low response rate: Tammerfors (26%) and Odense (29%). Also, three other schools have a response rate below fifty percent: Jÿvaskÿla (45%), Södertörn (48%), Gimlekollen (47%) and Roskilde (48%). We will look into the resons for the low response rate in Tammerfors and Odense.

Overall, however, with a total response from 2183 students, we are convinced that this data material offer exciting possibilites for cross-national research on the recruitment and professional ideals and aspirations of the Nordic Journalism Students. We also like to thank our partners at the participating schools for the contribution to making this survey possible, and of course – the students.

The paper “The Nordic Journalism Student: A Cross-national study” was presented at International Communication Association (ICA)  yearly conference in  San Francisco, May 24-28. 2007.

The paper discusses some main differences between journalist students in the Nordic countries, focusing on social, educational and work releated-background, motivation for choosing journalism as their study subject, career ambitions (future place of work and specialization), their role models, ideas of important characteristics of journalists, the role of the press in society and threats against a critical press.

UPDATE: A modified version of this paper have been published in Nordicom Review (2009).

Several documents from this event is available at this website. New documents include:

- A powerpoint (in .ppt and a much more print-friendly .pdf-format) from the presentation in Stavanger (with extra slides not shown)
- three documents with tables (very rough): By country, by country and gender, and by institution.

Please note that the tables by country have been weighed to accomondy for the different gender ratios in the Nordic countries. Also, Norway are represented by two groups “NorwState” which include Oslo, Volda, Stavanger, Bodø and Kautokeino. “NorwOther” includes the other. Also note that for Denmark, the students of Roskilde are not included (see the “methodology post” below.

Jan Fredrik

The questionnaire
The starting basis for the nordic questionaire was the questionnaires from Norwegian surveys of first-year students of journalism , which then was adapted to the comparative format necessarily for a cross-national survey. Many questions from the original questionnaire were removed, and many new included, according to the research interests of the participants in the Hovdabrekka group.

The web-questionnaire can be viewed here: http://www.opinio.net/opinio/s?s=1392

The sample of institutions
The aim of this sample was to include the largest and most important schools of journalism in the Nordic countries. First, all member institutions of the Nordic journalism educators in Norway (6), Sweden (4), Denmark (3) and Finland (3) was included – 16 in all. In addition, the Norwegian participants wanted to include 4 additional Norwegian institutions which offered journalism studies, totalling 20 institutions.

One institution – the journalism education (JMK) at The university of Stockholm – did not want to participate in the study, leaving the final number of institutions at 19.

The administration of the survey
Originally, the plan was to send out e-mail invitations to the students from the web survey program (Opinio) based on lists of email-adresseses collected by each country’s administrator. This gave us the opportunity to remind selectively only those who had not answered the questionnaire.

This plan was carried out in Norway, Sweden and Finland, but not in Denmark. The problems started when Roskilde University refused to give out the email-adresses for their students. Because of this, all the institutions in Denmark administrated the invitations and reminders themselves.

Because of a misunderstanding, Roskilde also sent the invitation to all journalism students at their institution – not only the first year students – and given the abscense of possibly discriminating variables in the survey and afforementioned lack of access to the list of students, it is difficult – maybe even impossible – to seperate first- from second year students at Roskilde in our data. Needless to say, with a few exceptions (ex. social background data, gender etc.) most of the data from Roskilde can thus not be compared directly with the data from other institutions in the survey.

Response rate
Two forms of response rate will be briefly discussed here: 1) answering- not answering the questionnaire and 2) completing-not completing the questionnaire

1) Anwering vs. not answering the questionnaire (total response/nonresponse)
The original sample included 936 students, of which 603 answered some or all questions in the questionnaire, giving a total response rate of 62%. The response rate, however, varied much across various institutions:

TOTAL 62 %
Finland – Jyväskylä 64 %
Finland – Tammerfors 46 %
Finland – Helsinki 61 %
Sweden – JMG Göteborg 62 %
Sweden – MKV Mitthögskolan 61 %
Sweden – Södertörn 35 %
Denmark – Århus 60 %
Denmark – Roskilde* -
Denmark – Odense 29 %
Norway – Oslo Uni. College 84 %
Norway – Volda Uni. College 77 %
Norway – Bodø Uni. College 85 %
Norway – Sami Uni. College 70 %
Norway – Uni. Stavanger 65 %
Norway – Uni. Bergen 78 %
Norway – Gimlekollen 74 %
Norway – BI 55 %
Norway – Bjørknes 95 %
Norway – MI 52 %

The response rate is probably somewhat higher than the numbers indicate, as students lists at start of the semestre are often incomplete. Two institutions appear especially problematic (in addition to Roskilde): University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and Södertörn University College in Sweden, which both have very low response-rate, 29% and 35% respectivly, giving doubt about the representativeness of the data. In general, the overall response rate must be considered satisfactionary, if not very good.

b) Completing vs. not completing the questionnaire (item nonresponse)
Another problem with the data is the high dropoff. Of the respondents who started answering the questionnaire, only 76% completed it . The genereally rising curve seem to indicate this problem to be related to the length of the questionnaire and not to a particular question. Naturally, this effect affact the data relativly in regard to their placement in the questionnaire. It should be noted, however, that such dropoff are a common problem in websurveys.

Jan Fredrik

Until very recently, there existed little systematic knowledge on the students of journalism in the Nordic countries. With the study of Norwegian students done by Ottosen, Bjørnsen and Hovden since the year 2000, we now have extensive survey data on the two largest schools of journalism in Norway (Oslo and Volda University Colleges), but little from other nordic countries or he many other schools of journalism in Norway. Other existing data is mainly in the form of very general surveys to the total student population at educational institutions, or internal entrance or candidate-studies with a rather limited scope. Until now, there has thus been a lack of comparative surveydata that makes it possible to compare and analyze differences between the schools of journalism in Norden.

For these reasons, the Hovdabrekka group planned and sent out a web-survey to new students at 19 schools of journalism in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland at the start of the autumn semestre in 2005.

Jan Fredrik