Discouraging preliminary research results

Until tonight, my general research question had been leaning to using the Xinhua News Agency as a lens to examine PRC policy in the South China Sea (previously, it had been using XNA as a lens to measure references to "historical nationalism," described in my post of a few days ago).

However, tonight I did a basic search of China's most pressing territorial claim in the South China Sea, the Spratlys islands (refered to in Xinhua as Nansha Islands or Nansha Qundao). The islands are barely mentioned from 1980 to 2000. In most years there are only a handful of references, and even in key years, such as 1988, when China and Vietnam fought a naval battle in the Spratlys, there are only a few dozen refs, out of tens of thousands of total stories.

A few refs in a computer-assisted content analysis is not enough for me to base a thesis on. At most, I might use this data as a footnote, but it certainly isn't enough to make any deep conclusions about PRC policy. As for why XNA has so few mentions, I can only speculate that it (and by extension, the government) is trying to play down its interest in the area, even though the Spratlys are clearly a major strategic interest of China.

So what now? Should I reconsider expanding my methodology to include historical nationalism, or other "nationalism indicators" (Olympics, references to "motherland", etc.)? Or turn the study around, and instead of centering my research question on Chinese policy, center it on Xinhua itself?

This is something I will be thinking about a lot in the next few days. I'll let you know the results of my study.