Slides

1. GEOG 420 / POL 420 / SOC 420
Spring 2018

4.  Examples: Documents, reports, manuscripts,
memoirs, speeches, etc.
 Issue ofTime (History) and Space (Location)
 Fewer ethical issues than observation,
interviewing, etc.

5. ADVANTAGES
 Access difficult subjects
 Raw data is nonreactive
 Analysis over time
 Increased sample size
 Cost
DISADVANTAGES
 Selective Survival
 Incomplete Nature
 Biased Content
 Unavailability of Records
 Lack of Standard Format

7.  Records NOT part of organized or systematic
record-keeping program.
 Produced and preserved in a casual, personal,
and sometimes accidental manner
 Examples: Diaries, memoirs, manuscripts,
correspondence, autobiographies,
“media of temporary existence”
(e.g. brochures, posters, etc.)

9.  Produced by organizations
 Carefully stored, easily accessed, and
available for long periods of time
 Examples: OpenSecrets,THOMAS, Almanac
of American Politics, University Crime Log

10.  Advantages
 Cost –Time and Money
 Accessibility
 More Extensive
 Disadvantages
 Control of record-keeping organization
 Unwillingness of organization to share data
 Finding out record-keeping organization’s practices
 How do we actually analyze the data that we collect?

12.  Step #1: Materials to Include in Analysis
 Selection guided by theory and existing research
 Examples:
 Speeches, newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc.
 Materials collectively make up sampling frame

13.  Step 2: Define Recording or Coding Units
 Units that are distinguished for description,
recording, and coding purposes in analysis
 Examples:
 Word or sentence fragment
 Sentence
 Paragraph
 Story
 Item asWhole

14.  Step 3: Categories of Content to Measure
 Variables that you want to focus on in study
 Can be most important part of content analysis
 Example: Viewing nightly news programs and
coding stories based on specific issues
(economy, health care, crime, education, etc.)

15.  Step 4: Devise System to Measure Content
 Presence or absence of given content category

17. VALIDITY
 Precise explanations of
procedures and categories
RELIABILITY
 Demonstrated through
intercoder reliability
 Two or more analysis,
using same procedures and
definitions, agree on
content categories
applied to material

19.  Reading
 Human Coding / Manual Content Analysis
 Dictionary-Based Approaches
 Supervised Learning

21.  Analysis process involves reading a text
 Advantages:
 Fundamental for inferring meaning from text
 Fewer assumptions that other methods
 Disadvantage: Cost

23.  Standard methodology for content analysis
and text coding with social science research
 Coders read text and attempt to assign one
of a set of categories to each unit

24. ADVANTAGES
 Less substantive
knowledge than deep
reading of the texts
 Less costly than reading
DISADVANTAGES
 Higher initial costs
 Arriving at categorization
scheme requires knowledge
of subject matter and
substantial time

26.  Analyst develops list of words and phrases
likely to be in a particular category
 Examples: LIWC, DICTION, JFREQ
 Computer tallies words in given categories

27. ADVANTAGES
 Analysis Costs
 Large number of texts
can be processed quickly
 Descriptive numerical
summaries are easily
generated
DISADVANTAGES
 High startup costs
 Building appropriate
dictionary requires good
deal of knowledge
 Trial and error

29.  Hand coding done to subset of texts
 “Training” Set: Evaluation tool for “test” set
 Algorithms used to attempt to infer mapping
from text features to hand-coded categories in
training set

30. ADVANTAGES
 Large amount of texts
due to automated process
DISADVANTAGES
 High startup costs due to
human construction of
“training” and “test” sets
of documents