1. WEEK 7: CONTENT ANALYSIS
TOPICS APPROPRIATE FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS
Researchers have used content analysis for many purposes:
To study themes in popular songs
Trends in the topics that newspapers cover
The ideological tone of newspaper editorials
Sex-role stereotypes in textbooks or films
How often people of different races appear in TV commercials, and TV programs
Enemy propaganda during wartime
The covers of popular magazines
Themes in advertising messages
Gender differences in conversations

2. Reveal international differences in communication content
Detect the existence of propaganda
Identify the intentions, focus or communication trends of an individual, group or institution
Describe attitudinal and behavioral responses to communications
Determine psychological or emotional state of persons or groups

3. Content analysis is useful for 3 types of research problems:
1.It is helpful for problems involving a large volume of texts. A researcher can measure large amounts of texts (years of newspaper articles) with sampling and multiple coding systems.
Coding system: A set of instructions or rules used in content analysis to explain how a researcher systematically converted the symbolic content from text into quantitative data

4. 2. It is helpful when a topic must be studied at a distance
2. It is helpful when a topic must be studied at a distance. For example, content analysis can be used to study historical documents, the writings of someone who has died.
3. Content analysis can reveal messages in a text that are difficult to see with casual observation. The creator of the text or those who read it may not be aware of all its themes, biases or characteristics. For example, authors of preschool picture books may not consciously intend to portray children in traditional stereotyped sex roles, but a high degree of sex stereotyping has been revealed through content analysis.

5. Content Analysis, Step by Step
1. Define the content you’re going to analyze. Base this definition on your news organization’s editorial goals.
2. Define the audience. Use demographic and other readership data for print.
3. Choose a time frame. What period are you going to measure?
4. Decide what to count. Use specific items, such as story forms, photographs or downloads, that be easily identified.
5. Count. Do the math.
6. Analyze. Apply the numbers to goals and determine success or failure.
7. Repeat regularly. Establish means for ongoing content analysis

6. Measurement and coding
For example: You want to determine how frequently TV dramas portray elderly characters in terms of negative stereotypes. You should develop a measure of the construct “negative stereotypes of the elderly”. The conceptualization may result in a list of stereotypes or negative generalizations about older people (disorientated, forgetful, bad-tempered, nursing homes, weak, difficulty of hearing, slow, inactive, and conservative).

7. For example, if 5 % of people over age 65 are in nursing homes, yet 50% of those over age 65 on TV are portrayed as being in nursing homes; it is an evidence of negative stereotyping.
You should first select the type of the media text being studied (TV drama, novels, photos in magazine, ads.)
Your unit of analysis can be a word, a phrase, a theme, a newspaper article, a character.

8. Measurement in content analysis uses structured observation: systematic, careful observation based on written rules. The rules explain how to categorize and classify observations. Written rules make replication possible and improve reliability.
Coding systems identify 4 characteristics of text content: frequency, direction, intensity, and space. A researcher measures from one to all 4 characteristics in a content analysis research project.

9. Frequency: simply means counting whether or not something occurs, and if it occurs, how often. Ex: How many elderly people appear on a TV program within a given week? What percentage of all characters are they, or in what percentage of programs do they appear?

10. Direction: is noting the direction of messages in the content along some continuum (positive or negative, supporting or opposed). For example, a researcher prepares a list of ways an elderly TV character can act. Some are positive (friendly, wise) and some are negative (selfish, bad-tempered)

11. Intensity: is the strength or power of a message in a direction
Intensity: is the strength or power of a message in a direction. Ex: the characteristic of forgetfulness can be minor (Ex: not remembering to take the keys when leaving home, taking time to recall the name of someone who she has not seen in years) or major (Ex: not remembering his name, not recognizing his children)

12. Space: A researcher can record the size of a text message of the amount of space or volume allocated to it. Space in written text is measured by counting words, sentences, paragraphs, or space on a page. For video or audio text, space can be measured by the amount of time allocated. Ex: a TV character may be present for a few seconds or continuously in every scene of a two-hour program.

13. Coding, validity, and Reliability
Manifest coding: Coding the visible, surface content in a text is called manifest coding. Ex: A researcher counts the number of times a phrase or word (ex: red) appears in written text, or whether a specific action (ex: kiss) appears in a photograph or video scene.
The coding system lists terms or actions that are located in text. You can use computer program for searching your list of relevant words or phrases. The possibility that there are multiple meanings of a word limits the measurement validity of manifest coding.

14. Latent coding: (also called semantic analysis) looks for the underlying, implicit meaning in the content of a text. Ex: A researcher reads an entire paragraph and decides whether it contains erotic themes or a romantic mood. Your coding system has general rules to guide your interpretation of the text and for determining whether particular themes or moods are present.

15. Latent coding tends to be less reliable than manifest coding
Latent coding tends to be less reliable than manifest coding. It depends on a coder’s knowledge of language and social meaning. Training, practice, and written rules improve reliability, but it is still difficult to identify themes or moods. But people communicate meaning in many implicit ways that depend on context, not just in specific words.
A researcher can use both manifest and latent coding. If two approaches agree, the final result is strengthened.

16. Content analysis and visual material
Researchers have used content analysis to study visual text such as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, clothing, videos and films. Visual text is difficult to analyze because it communicates messages or emotional content indirectly through images, symbols, and metaphors. Moreover, visual message often contain mixed messages at multiple levels of meaning.

17. To conduct content analysis on visual text, the researcher must read the meaning within visual text. You must interpret signs and discover the meanings attached to symbolic images. Such reading is not mechanical (image X always means Z); it depends heavily on the cultural context because the meaning of an image is cultural bound.
Ex: a red light does not inevitably mean stop; it means stop only in cultures in which people have given that meaning.

18. People construct cultural meanings that they attach to symbolic images, and the meanings can change over time. Some meanings are clearer and more firmly attached to symbols and images than others.
Most people share a common meaning for key symbols of the dominant culture, but various people may read a symbol differently. For example, one group of people reads a national flag to mean patriotism, duty to nation, and honor of tradition. For others, the flag evokes fear, because they read it to mean government domination, abuse of power, and military aggression. You should aware of potentially divergent readings of symbols.

19. Sociopolitical groups may invent or construct new symbols with attached meanings (a pink triangle came to mean gay pride). Since images have symbolic content with complex, multilayer meaning, researchers often combine qualitative judgments about the images with quantitative date in content analysis.

20. Ex: You conduct a content analysis of the covers of major American magazines that dealt with issue of immigration into the US. Looking at the covers of 10 magazines from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, he classified the covers as having one of 3 major messages: affirmative, alarmist, or neutral, or balanced. Beyond his classification and identifying trends in messages, he noted how the mix of people (race, gender, age, and dress) in the photographs and the frequent use of major symbols, such as the Statute of Liberty or the US flag, communicated messages.
Visual images on magazine covers have multiple levels of meaning, and viewers construct specific meanings, and viewers construct specific meanings as they read the image and use their cultural knowledge.

21. How to conduct content analysis research
Question formulation: Researcher begins with a research question. For example: You want to study how newspapers cover a political campaign. Your research includes the amount of coverage, the importance of the coverage, and whether the coverage favors one candidate over another. You could survey people about what they think of the newspaper coverage, but a better strategy is to examine the newspapers directly using content analysis.
Units of analysis: A researcher decides on the units of analysis. It is the amount of text that is assigned a code. For example: for a political campaign, each issue (or day) of a newspaper could be the unit of analysis, or each newspaper article, or each paragraph of an article.

22. Sampling: Researcher often uses random sampling in content analysis
Sampling: Researcher often uses random sampling in content analysis. First, you define the population and the sampling element. For example, the population might be all words, all sentences, all paragraphs, or all articles in certain types of documents over a specified time period. Likewise, it could include each conversation, situation, scene, or episode of certain types of television programs over a specified time period. For example, I want to know how women and minorities are portrayed in U.S. weekly newsmagazines

23. My unit of analysis is the article
My unit of analysis is the article. My population includes all articles published in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report between 1985 and 2005.I first verify that the three magazines were published in those years and define precisely what is meant by an "article." For instance, do film reviews count as articles? Is there a minimum size (two sentences) for an article? Is a multipart article counted as one or two articles?

24. Second, I examine the three magazines and find that the average issue of each contains 45 articles and that the magazines are published 52 weeks per year. With a 20-year time frame, my population contains over 140,000 articles (3 X 45 X 52 X 20 = 140,400). My sampling frame is a list of all the articles. Next, I decide on the sample size and design. After looking at my budget and time, I decide to limit the sample size to 1,400 articles. Thus, the sampling ratio is 1 percent. I also choose a sampling design. I avoid systematic sampling because magazine issues are published cyclically according to the calendar (e.g., an interval of every 52nd issue results in the same week each year). Because issues from each magazine are important, I use stratified sampling.

25. I stratify by magazine, sampling 1,400/3 = 467 articles from each
I stratify by magazine, sampling 1,400/3 = 467 articles from each. I want to ensure that articles represent each of the 20 years, so I also stratify by year. This results in about 23 articles per magazine per year.
Finally, I draw the random sample using a random-number table to select 23 numbers for the 23 sample articles for each magazine for each year. I develop a sampling frame worksheet to keep track of my sampling procedure. See Table for a sampling frame worksheet in which 1,398 sample articles are randomly selected from 140,401 articles.

26. TABLE: Excerpt from Sampling Frame Worksheet
MAGAZINE
ISSUE
ARTICLE
NBR
ARTICLE IN
SAMPLE
SAMPLED ARTICLE ID
Time
January, 1985
p. 2-3 1 No
1996 p
202
yes 10

27. Variables and Constructing Coding Categories
In my example, I am interested in the construct of an African American woman portrayed in a significant leadership role.
Example of latent coding questions, magazine article leadership role study
1. Characteristics of the article. What is the magazine? What is the date of the article? How large is the article? What was its topic area? Where did it appear in the issue? Were photographs used?

28. 2. People in the article. How many people are named in the article
2. People in the article. How many people are named in the article? Of these, how many are significant in the article? What is the race and sex of each person named?
3. Leadership roles. For each significant person in the article, which ones have leadership roles? What is the field of leadership or profession of the person?
4. Positive or negative roles. For each leadership or professional role, rate how positively or negatively it is shown. For example, 5 =highly positive, 4 = positive, 3 = neutral, 2 = negative, 1 =highly negative, 0 = ambiguous.

29. Inferences
A researcher can or cannot make on the basis of results is critical in content analysis. Content analysis describes what is in the text. It cannot reveal the intentions of those who created the text or the effects that messages in the text have on those who receive them. For example, content analysis shows that children's books contain sex stereotypes. That does not necessarily mean that children's beliefs or behaviors are influenced by the stereotypes; such an inference requires a separate research project on how children's perceptions develop.
Blank example
Article Magazine Date Size
Person: Race: Gender: Leader: Field