Who is to blame for the terrorist attack? Comparison of content analysis and survey data as sources of responsibility ascriptions

Journal of Risk Research. 2022. Vol. 25. No. 3. P. 285–302.

Gavrilov K. A.

There is a growing body of research that uses different content analysis techniques to study risk and related issues. In this article, we focused on the question of how analysis of textual data relates to individual judgments, specifically responsibility ascriptions after the case of a terrorist attack. Our methodological goal was to assess the agreement between the results obtained via unobtrusive methods and evaluations extracted from survey data. Our substantive goal was to examine the specificity of responsibility attributions in the situation of a terrorist attack based on manual content analyses of blog posts. We addressed these questions in three empirical studies. The first focused on the 2011 Domodedovo Airport bombing. A content analysis of a random sample of 1050 posts showed that individual terrorists are rarely blamed in contrast to other actors. This unexpected finding inspired the subsequent studies. In the second study, a content analysis of essays written by students about terrorist attacks in Volgograd in 2013 (n = 26) was used in conjunction with an online survey of these students. The result was that almost all the actors had high blame ratings, even actors not mentioned in the essays. A third study examined the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting. Apart from essays and an online survey of students (n = 80), we also conducted a manual content analysis of blog posts (n = 300). We found weak, but important evidence for concurrence of content analysis and survey data: students who mentioned French authorities in essays indeed blamed this actor higher in the survey. In conclusion,
content analysis proved to be a suitable tool for inferring responsibility ascriptions from textual data, but reconstructed evaluations from texts do not always correspond to the opinion poll data.

Keywords: риск, risk, контент-анализ, content analysis, blame and responsibility judgment, unobtrusive data, суждения о вине и ответственности, нереактивные данные, теракт, terrorist attack