To Örebro University

Using the framework of social representations theory - more precisely the concepts of anchoring and objectification - this article analyses the emotions on which the media reporting on climate change draws. Emotions are thereby regarded as discursive phenomena. A qualitative analysis of two series in Swedish media on climate change, one in a tabloid newspaper and one in public service television news, is presented showing how the verbal and visual representations are attached to emotions of fear, hope, guilt, compassion and nostalgia. It is further argued that emotional representations of climate change may on the one hand enhance public engagement in the issue, but on the other hand may draw attention away from climate change as the abstract, long-term phenomenon of a statistical character that it is.

In media and communication studies, a number of social science and humanistic perspectives meet. As a multidisciplinary field it tends, however, to borrow methods from diverse disciplines and theoretical schools quite eclectically, without taking into consideration the fact that they may be based on various basic implicit assumptions. Underlying the methods there are quite different suppositions about the nature of reality, and about the nature of knowledge and how to gain knowledge. We rarely make that explicit when using specific methods or combinations of methods. The aim of this article is to discuss qualitative research and focus on ontological assumptions behind our methodological arguments and choices. Generalization, often seen as the Achilles heel of qualitative research, will also be brought up and its relation to ontological positions will be clarified. Qualitative audience research will be used to concretize the discussion, but the problems discussed will be of a more general nature and valid for qualitative research in general.