Police organisations have come under pressure to generate effective means of engaging with the communities that they serve. Established as a means of communication, police organisations have turned to social media to engage with citizens. A growing body of work examines the nature of public engagement with police social media. However, it tends not to differentiate by the features of place.
Karen Bullock (University of Surrey), Alistair Harkness (University of New England), Jacques Mellberg (Queensland University of Technology) and Hilary Christmas (University of Surrey) have started filling this gap by examining the effectiveness of the police use of Facebook as an engagement tool with rural communities, reporting on research conducted in the United Kingdom and in Australia.
Their aim is to identify what type of content rural police Facebook pages are posting and whether certain post types and post characteristics are associated with higher levels of engagement. In a forthcoming article, they argue that certain characteristics of Facebook posts assist in gaining ‘cut through’ and thus effective engagement with rural communities.
The ambition is to encourage others to replicate this study. As such, below you will find the Codebook they created and the Content Analysis Dataset they produced.
Codebook
Bullock_et_al_2023_Codebook_Police_Facebook
