The Social Representations of Educational Quality in the Discourse of Media Writing: An analysis in the context of students' conflict in Chile, 2011

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand Social Representations of educational quality, in relation to improvement factors, in actors' discourses which appear in written Mass Media within the context of the students' conflict in Chile 2011 from theoretic-methodological analysis of Grounded Theory. Atlas ti v.6.4 was used to make open codification of 29 pieces of news from Chilean written Media, from where 79 codes were created. Through Axial codification, which is an iterative process, 16 categories were built upon the basis of these codes, constituting a preliminary explanatory model about the phenomenon emerged. This phenomenon is defined as the ideas of quality linked to the notions and the aims of education as to improvement strategies. This model is based upon the causal conditions that describe the quality of education as insufficient, and it is related to three key categories: quality guarantees, financing, and assessment.