1. GCSE Psychology Do TV and video games affect people’s behaviour?
Content analysis as a research method

2. Learning objectives
To learn about what content analysis means and why it is used.
To investigate how to carry out a content analysis.
To look at the issues associated with doing a content analysis.

3. What is content analysis?
Content analysis is a research method used to measure the number of times a behaviour or event occurs within one or several forms of media.
e.g. songs, TV, books, magazines, computer games, newspapers etc

4. Conducting a content analysis
Read pages and answer the following questions:
What is content analysis?
When might it be used?
What is tallying?
What do you need to consider when conducting a content analysis?

5. Content analysis can be done on many forms of media.
Give some examples.

6. When may a Psychologist Use a content analysis?
OFCOM – Eg Cumberpatch & Gauntlett
Educational Psychologist
What others can you think of?

7. Conducting content analysis
You would need to:
Decide what aggressive behaviour is.
Develop a list of aggressive behaviours or categories that could be measured as aggressive.
Decide on they sample you need to study (e.g. which TV programmes or adverts, what time of the day)
Tally (count) the number of times aggression occurred.
Assess the reliability of your results.

8. Conducting a content analysis
5) What categories will be on your list?
6) What sampling decisions do you have to consider?
7) What is meant by unrepresentative?
8) What does the word reliably mean?
9) Your task: design a content analysis to look at various behaviours on a TV show appropriate for your age group. Do not choose too many categories as you won’t be able to keep up on your tallying! Watch your programme and tally up how many times the behaviour was shown.
Bring your

9. Your task
Design a content analysis to look at various behaviours in the Transformers 3 trailer.
Do not choose too many categories as you won’t be able to keep up on your tallying!
Watch your programme and tally up how many times the behaviour was shown.

10. And finally (to check you know what you are doing!)
Answer questions 1-3 at the bottom of page 105.