Each company’s annual report for 1997, 1999 and 2001 was fully analyzed and CSR
classified on an individual recording sheet. A list of operational definitions was used
for each of the themes (see below for themes) and a set of decision rules were applied. A
pilot sample of reports was jointly analyzed by the writers as well as a third party
using the decision rules; where either the rules were unclear or there were obvious
discrepancies in the scoring, the rules were tightened, this is in line with recent
significant content approach works (Hooks et al., 2002).