Sleeuwenhoek, Britt (2026) Does the Author’s Gender shape News Language_ A corpus study of Algemeen Dagblad journalists. Bachelor thesis, Data Science and Society (DSS).
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Abstract
This thesis investigates whether journalist gender shapes the language used in news articles at Algemeen Dagblad (AD). Building on research into gender, journalism, and stylistic variation, the study examines differences in five LIWC categories: pronouns, affective, social, power, and cognitive process language, across male and female journalists. A Dutch corpus-based approach was applied to articles from two AD sections, Onderwijs (Education) and Politiek (Politics). The analysis draws on 244 single-authored articles and combines descriptive statistics with OLS regression models, controlling for article length and publication date. Results show no statistically significant gender differences in any of the five LIWC categories after False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction. While descriptive distributions suggest some divergent patterns between sections, these are not robust enough to support a reliable gender effect. These findings suggest that journalistic style within this corpus is shaped more strongly by institutional and topic-specific factors than by author gender. The study contributes to existing literature by shifting focus from representation and sourcing to authorial language at the textual level, and by extending corpus-based gender research to a Dutch news context. It also demonstrates the value of combining computational text analysis with journalistic metadata, while pointing to the need for larger and more diverse corpora in future research.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Verkhodanova, V. |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jun 2026 10:32 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jun 2026 10:32 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/796 |
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