Thematic analysis of national online narratives on regular asymptomatic testing for Covid-19 in schools in England

Table 1 Details of data sources and number of comments sampled 1–31 March 2021

Data source		Number of comments
Daily Mail comments^a		800
Online newspaper Facebook pages^b	Daily Express Daily Mail The Mirror The Metro The Independent The Guardian The Sun The Telegraph	36 97 100 100 100 100 100 100
Parenting forums^c	Mumsnet Netmums	966 29
	Total number of comments	2528

^a The Guardian and Daily Mail are the most widely read digital newspapers [24]. The Guardian had disabled their comment function at the time of data sampling. Eight Daily Mail articles were identified and the first 100 comments from each article were included in the analysis
^b In 2020, 45% of people reported they consume their news via social media, mostly Facebook (75%) [24]. The article with the most comments on each newspaper Facebook page was sampled, up to a maximum of 100 comments per article
^c Mumsnet is the largest parenting forum in the UK, with over 6 million unique visitors each month [22], whereas Netmums has around 1 million members [23]. Both forums were included as the demographic characteristics of members are different; Mumsnet users are slightly older, more likely to have completed higher education [22] and with a larger proportion of users with a household income over the national average. Netmums has around 30% of members with above average incomes and 40% from low-income families [23]

ISSN: 1471-2458