The aim of this article is to explore the differences between investigative journalism and research within social science. The explicit use of theory and methods is emphasized, while the analysis shows that there are some similarities and, not least, some twilight zones. The article is written by a researcher with a background in journalism and using a case which has been analysed both as a journalist and a scientist.

This article presents an analysis of three Norwegian diasporic films made in 2005. The discussion is centred upon the thematic concerns of the films and their construction of ethnic identity seen in orientalist and occidentalist perspectives. The article argues that the films offer valuable insights into diasporic existence, and that the identity politics of the films – in spite of being marked both by orientalism and occidentalism – are characterized by a desire to avoid to obvious distinctions between good and bad ethnic groups.

In this article, I propose a new strategy for measuring generic news frames, extending the work of Semetko and Valkenburg (2000). I argue that frames should be measured through concrete variables that together form a frame (several items per frame, cf. ibid. and de Vreese (2003)). Secondly, I argue that these variables should be measured using graded scale variables as opposed to dichotomous variables. This is seen to pose important challenges, and advantages, to inter-coder reliability as well as validity issues.