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Because of their power to form the public discourse, the media can influence how people “see” the world, what issues they think about, what is controversial for them and what is rather normal or even incontestable. Of course, the media discourse does not represent the public opinion, it is rather a discursive arena where the public debate is developed and personal opinions and attitudes are formed. On the other hand, legislative (con)texts overlapp and interact with the real life practices, the agenda of the state as well as different political and civic groups.
We concentrated on print media and in order to investigate possible long-term changes of the media messages about reproduction and parenting we collected 1) all relevant articles in the last 10 years (2002-2011) in the most important mainstream broadsheet daily (N=1500) and analyzed them according to main themes and discourses they draw from. Then, to facilitate the inclusion of minority discourses, we collected also 2) all relevant articles in the most important Catholic broadsheet (N=132) for the last year (10/2010-9/2011). All the articles from the last year from both newspapers (N=305) were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis and basic critical discursive analysis. To understand the legislative framework we analyzed 3) all relevant laws currently in force, selected laws also from the viewpoint of changes over time.
The findings from media and legislation text analysis correspond with the participants´ accounts cumulated in our pilot study (4 focus-group discussions: 2 male, 2 female, aged 25-32, with a play-role instruction to simulate family-planning negotiation between two engaged partners), especially concerning the negative stereotypes about fatherhood.