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example, is a national sports paper in China. It often delves into the technical aspects of sports development, sports skills, results of competitions and so on. It is therefore not so suitable for studying a social-psychological concept like face.
To summarize, reports and comments on the six events within the time frames that appear in the People's Daily would be collected as the verbal data for the present study. Through in-depth analyses, the press portrayals of the nation's, the Party's, the Government's or the Party Government's status, role performance, moral conduct, others' reactions, honour, influence, and deference would be looked at to see if they correlate with the working of face as discussed earlier. If so, face as pertaining to a particular collective unit is established. The editorial and semantic treatment by the press would also be examined to explore the traces of face strategies. Further questions such as whose face, increased face or decreased face, facework being carried out or not, types of strategies, and amount of face strategies would be tackled.
The Content Analysis
For the present purpose, the methodology chosen is content analysis. This is the most suitable for a search into the verbal data contained in the press. It can be recalled that face is most manifest when it is at stake. But even so, the word "face" may not appear itself. It, therefore, requires an analytical framework which can detect its presence by way of its various factors and attributes and their interplay with face strategies.
It has been pointed out that there have been studies on the concept of face previously. But so far, definitions or analytical framework that have been constructed about face mainly focus on the working and the popularity of the concept in real-life situations. Since this paper attempts to look at the concept of face in press contents, an alternative analytical framework needs to be established. Although this framework may not be claimed as a great innovation, it is an original work in its own right.
The present analytical framework is based on the discussion earlier that face is most manifest in face-enhancing and face-threatening situations. In each of these situations, there can be two blocks of personalities qualifying the face situations. In an interpersonal interaction, faces of both oneself and others are involved. In both face-enhancing and face-threatening situations, one's face and other's face may belong to an