The project will evolve in eleven work packages. All work packages involve parallel work in both countries. Only some aspects will be done unilaterally in one country.

1. Development of a coding scheme

The coding scheme will be developed, based on extensive experiences with similar projects, discussed among the principle investigators, and tested with a sample of articles to make sure that all categories can be applied in both countries. Based on the detailed codebook a data input mask will be prepared. This process will be coordinated by the German in close collaboration with and input by the Greek team.

2. Coder instruction

In a one week course, all coders from both countries are trained including multiple practices and comparison of coding results. The training will be continued in both countries at home until sufficient reliability is achieved. New problems arising during the training will be discussed between the partners, also in a joint validity check.

3. Selection of articles

Based on an electronic search all articles between October 2009 and September 2013, covering to some extent the crisis, are identified. As in similar projects, the preliminary exploration findings will guide the selection of articles in terms of the type and size of sampling procedures.

4. Coding of articles

The coding will be done in each country. The coding has to be continuously supervised to detect any problems or inconsistencies arising as early as possible. Therefore besides coders, employed on student level, also highly qualified full time researchers are crucial.

5. Data cleaning

Data sets will be cleaned and multiple cross checks are carried out. This is an important task to guarantee a high quality of the data. Data cleaning will take place first in each country with recourse to the coded material. In a second step the merged data set will be cleaned and checked again (German team).

6. Data analysis

The quantitative analysis is carried out jointly by the two teams. Description, hypotheses, and further questions referring to each individual country will be analyzed by the respective country team. This guarantees adequate knowledge of the local circumstances and parallel developments. The intersection of the debates between the two countries is jointly analyzed. In order to guarantee a consistent analysis of the joint data set, two data analysis workshops are planned.

7. Selection of web material

For the relevant political parties core material on their position on the crisis is identified. As soon as preliminary results from the newspaper based claims analysis is available, the civil society actors will be selected and the core material gathered.

8. Coding of web material

The material of political parties and civil society actors on the crisis will be coded with the identical coding scheme that is applied to newspaper articles.

9. Semi-structured interviews

Interviews with journalists from the analyzed newspapers and core actors of the debate will be carried out in each country. We plan to interview five journalists (one per newspaper) and around ten important actors of the debate in each country. Additionally, we want to interview around ten influential actors from supranational institutions. These interviews will be conducted collaboratively by one researcher from each country.

10. Analysis of interviews

All interviews will be transcribed and analyzed using Atlas/ti. The coding of the material will be inspired by the coding rules of the grounded theory (Strauss 1994), though not strictly applying the whole methodology. The coding will be done in each country. As interviewing as well as analyzing the interviews explicitly stipulates the openness for new aspects and perspectives, a very close coordination between the two countries is not necessary. The analysis will be coordinated together with the quantitative analysis.

11. Presentation of results

The results will be presented to a wide array of decision makers, and other actors involved in crisis management, intercultural dialogue and the media, and to the scientific community.