Popular Press Articles on Free-Roaming Cats, 1990-2018

1990 to 2018 coverage of 796 popular press articles from a Lexis Nexus search, coded for messages about free-roaming domestic cats. The dataset was created by Elizabeth A. Gow for a media-content analysis. The bulk of articles (~95%) originate from the United States and Canada.

Use Cases

• Analyze media framing of cat management strategies like trap-neuter-release based on mentions in articles.
• Identify the prominence of different stakeholder groups (e.g., cat advocates vs. researchers) based on messenger coding.
• Track the frequency of environmental impact acknowledgment in media coverage over time.
• Study geographic bias in press coverage based on the stated origin of articles.

Strengths

• 796 articles provide a substantial corpus for analysis.
• A defined time range from 1990 to 2018 allows for longitudinal study.
• Clear geographic focus on the United States and Canada (~95% of articles).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for specific coded variables is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and language bias inherent to the search method (English-language, North American press).

Provenance

Source

Elizabeth A. Gow

Collection Method

Systematic search of English-language popular print media via Lexis Nexus, coded using a developed codebook.

Time Range

1990-2018

Geography

Primarily United States and Canada