Content Analysis

1
Content Analysis

• Chapter 16

2
What is Content Analysis?

• Approach to analysis of documents and texts,
  including visual images, aural and virtual text
• may be quantitative or qualitative

3
Quantitative Content Analysis

• Quantifies content in terms of predetermined
  categories
• Attempts to be systematic and reliable
• Rules for how to assign unstructured material to
  pre-coded categories

4
Research Questions (Quantitative)

• Must be clearly specified before analysis
• Decide which dimensions of texts to quantify
• e.g., news coverage of an issue
• who, what, how much, where, when and why?
• how many different views represented?
• what is selected for inclusion?
• omissions what is not reported?

5
Sampling Media

• Which types of text?
• printed or visual data? documents? mass media?
• If mass media, which kind?
• TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, or more than
  one type?
• For each type of text, which examples?
• e.g., tabloid or broadsheet newspapers

6
Sampling Dates

• May be determined by event analysis
• May be historical analysis of older texts
• May be ongoing, general phenomenon
• when to start and stop analyzing?
• Probability sampling where possible

7
What is to be Counted?

• Significant actors
• protagonists and alternative voices
• Words
• frequency of emotive words
• connotations and styles of discourse
• Subjects and themes
• Dispositions
• values and ideology

8
Coding Schedule

• Form onto which coded data will be entered
• Often a tabular form
• Each column represents a dimension to be analyzed
• Each row represents a unit of analysis (item of
  text)
• Codes are written into blank cells in table

9
Coding Manual

• Set of instructions for coders lists all possible
  categories for each dimension and shows which
  codes/numbers refer to which category
• Provides guidance on how to decide on a code and
  what to do if more than one code applies

10
Practice

• Media Tobacco ads from the 1960s
• Research question What ideals, desires and
  fears do tobacco companies exploit to sell
  cigarettes?

11
Content Analysis

• Manifest content
• taste
• value for money
• superior produce
• superior packaging

• Latent content
• achieve status
• become sexier
• become happier
• become more popular
• become more manly or womanly

12
Coding Schedule Columns

• Lead
• sex, age, quality, lights own, lights companion
• Companion
• sex, age, quality, lights own, lights lead
• Relationship
• romance, married, friends, etc.

13

• Setting
• domestic, rural, urban public space, recreation,
  work, nature, car, boat
• Manifest content
• taste, value for money

14
Coding Manual Qualities of Lead Character

• smart
• strong/tough
• sexy
• independent/free
• popular/ belonging
• sensual
• prudent/ thrifty
• good parent

• wealthy
• attractive/ alluring
• talented
• heroic
• likeable/ average
• successful
• respectable
• generous

15
Potential Pitfalls

• Ensure that coding scheme has
• discrete dimensions
• mutually exclusive categories
• exhaustive categories
• clear instructions to coders
• specified unit of analysis
• inter-coder and intra-coder reliability

16
Advantages of Content Analysis

• Transparent, replicable method
• Counting involves minimal interpretation
• Allows for longitudinal analysis
• Relatively unobtrusive - no reactive effects
• Flexible - can be applied to various texts
• Provides information about populations that are
  difficult to access directly

17
Disadvantages of Content Analysis

• Only as good as the quality of the documents
• Coding manuals have to be interpreted
• Variant interpretations of latent content
• Descriptive rather than explanatory
• no answers to why questions
• Atheoretical?

18
Qualitative Content Analysis

• Inductive method
• Search for underlying themes in documents or text
• No reliance on predetermined categories
• Themes are expanded and refined in the process of
  analysis
• Selected material is presented to illustrate
  themes

19
Traditions of Qualitative Content Analysis

• Semiotics
• study of signs/symbols in everyday life
• polysemy many possible interpretations of
  ordinary signs
• Hermeneutics
• study of texts from perspective of its author
• interpreted within historical and cultural context

20

• Conversation analysis
• originated in ethnomethodology
• study of taken-for-granted rules that structure
  social interaction
• Discourse analysis
• more than the study of talk and language
• concerned with the ways language constitutes
  social reality and its effects