Media Analysis

A media analysis in depth about TV series on national and international levels will present widespread reception and success of Turkish TV series; and how this phenomenon functions in line with the political and diplomatic relations between Turkey/Serbia and other countries in which the series are shown. The development of TV series not only from the perspectives of their development but also the exports and their contribution to the economy will be analysed.

The news and comments written by journalists and film and television critiques on the TV series that point to the political economy of the TV series will be analysed through content and discourse analysis.

The printed and social media analysis will be conducted separately in both countries.

The outcomes of the analysis conducted separately in Turkey and Serbia will be combined and analysed together. The data obtained will be included in the evaluation process together with the quantitative data.

Focus Group

Concept and content determination:

  1. The first stage of the selection: To select the four most viewed Serbian and Turkish TV series (historical epic, family/social melodrama, soap opera, web series) produced from 2017 onwards – as the advanced stage of the Serbian-Turkish relations in the politics and economy – studying the statistics of both Serbian and Turkish TV series audience reports.
  2. Two focus groups will be created to conduct a comparative perspective study on the selected Serbian and Turkish TV series’ and the reception of the media representations on these series.

1) The participants are educated, working/writing in and about film and television; public relations, international relations and finance; 1 undergraduate, 2 MA and 2 PhD level students= 5 students from each country

2) 5 scholars from Turkey and 3 scholars from Serbia and Turkey. They will be introduced with the project’s theoretical basis and will watch 4 series from each 4 Serbian and Turkish series.

Preparation of interview forms: open-ended and argumentative questions in line with the basic hypotheses of the study will be prepared for the focus group interviews.

The second group of the Serbian team (the scholars) will be in Istanbul for the FOCUS GROUP WEEK together with the Turkish team and these focus groups’ study will span over a week long watching the chosen Serbian and Turkish TV series in Istanbul while the first group (students) of the Serbian team will watch the chosen Serbian and Turkish TV series in Belgrade.

After having watched the series, interviews will be held to obtain in-depth and qualitative data in Istanbul and Belgrade. The aim of the focus group meetings, which are planned to be held with people who are especially related to the field of film and television, public relations, finance and (students and scholars) is to reach more qualified information.

Webinars

Two webinars will be realized with the participation of the TV series sector, related state (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Directorate of Cinema), and public institutions (TRT, Turkish Radio and Television Broadcasting Institution). TV series sector representatives; scholars will publish and realize research on TV series and a scientific conference as the closing event.

Data Analysis

A comparative data analysis of Turkish TV and the Serbian TV series will enable us to include policy and strategy recommendations using the tools of geocriticism. Co-production for Serbia and Turkey using the data of the projects’ research will have as an output narrative proximities and expectations between fear, humiliation and hope, and furthermore to share and support the finances to increase the number of the audience of both sides.

The output of the focus groups’ study on the TV series will be used as the basis of the analysis of the geopolitics of the Serbian and Turkish TV series.

Evaluation

Evaluation of results obtained from focus groups interviews together with media analysis will map out which genres, narrative strategies and themes serve the reception of the cultures and help achieve a better understanding between the countries, and thereby support the “state to state” and “state to public” strategies for both.

Improvements

Three focus groups were held as part of the project. The first focus group study was conducted with 2 different groups, with the participation of Turkish and Serbian research teams/academics and Kadir Has University students. It was held on August 31 and September 1 at Kadir Has University Campus. The second focus group study was carried out with the participation of two undergraduate, two graduate and two doctoral students from Communication Sciences, selected from the RTC435 TV Series course, with a second focus group study that was not planned in the project proposal to reach data saturation.

During the focus group studies, which lasted for a total of three days, the participants’ audio recordings were taken and then the transcription work was carried out by the project scholars by listening to the audio recordings exceeding 13 hours. More than 500 keywords were determined together with our project coordinator Deniz Bayrakdar, coded and analyzed through the MAXQDA program in line with the transcriptions, by selecting sentences that directly or indirectly refer to the keywords of the project research questions such as identity, politics, soft power, finance, culture, geopolitics and geocriticism.

It was decided to hold a third meeting to ask new questions that emerged in this direction, and the final focus group study was carried out again with the same participants in the 2nd focus group, and the second focus group study was carried out with more in-depth questions based on new research questions that emerged from the first focus group interviews and required in-depth interviews. developed. Then, the audio recordings of the last meeting were deciphered and coded in the MAXQDA program. The results obtained in line with the coding were put into numbers in tables and interpreted. Verbal interpretations of these codings were also added to the March Report.

YouTube analysis started in the first phase of 2021-2022 and continued in the second phase after September 2022. Youtube data were analyzed according to the sampling method, such as the comments under the YouTube videos of the Turkish TV series Şahsiyet and Babil, and the comments of the most “popular” episodes on YouTube of Awakening: The Great Seljuk and Once Upon a Time Çukurova. The numerical values of more than four thousand videos shared on the YouTube channels of the TV series selected for the project were collected in a file. In order to understand the interaction, the number of views, likes and comments were taken into account. Afterwards, a pool was created where the shared comments could be analyzed. The comments were selected by considering the most popular videos of the channels. The most popular comments of the most popular videos were chosen. These comments were chosen by paying attention to the topics such as identity, politics, genre, audience, finance, cultural affinity, daily life and in general the geopolitics of emotions and geocriticism in the comments, and those that indirectly or directly refer to these concepts. At the same time, a pool of comments was created by paying attention to the keywords determined for the focus group coding. Afterwards, all the comments in the pool were coded in the MAXQDA program and their tables were extracted. Both the tables and the contents of the comment were analyzed as was done in the focus group.