Societal events are events like elections, significant changes in laws, demonstrations, but also  extreme weather conditions. All such events can have an effect on a society and, consequently, influence the attitudes of its population. When conducting a survey, the impact of an event must be considered and, whenever possible, controlled especially in survey projects in which different countries participate. However, manual identification of significant events that occur during the data collection phase is a very error-prone and time-consuming task. Therefore, we have developed a procedure to identify events using a combination of two different approaches of the (quantitative) computer-assisted content analysis: the reference text technique and the statistical association approach. On the basis of distinctive features of word usage in a so-called reference text corpus and in newspaper texts of a specific time period in which events should be located, words are selected and classified by means of an exploratory factor analysis. We will demonstrate this procedure by means of an example in which we will identify events automatically in Germany as well as in Great Britain. First, we will describe the composition of a reference text corpus. Thereafter, we will provide details for the calculation of relative differences between the relative frequencies for each word in the reference corpus and in the newspaper text. We will use the words with the highest relative differences as keywords for further analysis. Based on the co-occurrence of these keywords in each newspaper article, we will conduct a factor analysis to identify the events.