Flyktingar på dagordingen : En innehållsanalys av flyktingfrågans närvaro i 15 tidningar under andra världskriget

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study have been to follow the swedish public press debate about refugees, under the period 1939-1946. The study have been achieved with a quantitative approach for the purpose of describing how active the refugee-question was in the public debate. In a qualitative increase of the original stance the study also covered the different values that have been found to be connected to the refugee debate. My sourcematerial was made out of 15 contemporary newspapers. The newspapers have been gathered with a concept-search consisting of the conceptwords refugee and ”foreigner”. The qualitative and quantative research were supported by the agenda-setting theory. The agenda-setting theory describes how the media decides which questions is perceived as important in the public conversation. Different media, for example newspapers, are creating an agenda through their selection of topics which is then transfered to the reader. The professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have shown that the agenda-setting function is, in some senses, controlling the public conversation. In the qualitative research, the words refugee and “foreigner”, have been found to be less active from 1939-1942, followed by an increase later in the research period. The result of the quantative research points have found a connection between the newspapers political faction and how much they used the searchwords. A similar connection have also been discovered, linking how often the resarchwords where used with the newspapers regional position. In the purpose of expanding the research with a qualitative aproach I have discovered a verity of values in the refugee debate that have been categorized with Mikael Byströms opinion-patterns, the included, the excluded and the acceptance pattern.  Key words: Refugee, Agenda-setting function, Press