Content analysis lecture

1. CONTENT ANALYSIS
SMST 101 The Moving Image
Lecture 8 (part two)

2. CONTENT ANALYSIS???
• Research tool
• Determines presence of certain words or concepts within
texts or sets of texts.
• Quantitative data

3. WHY???

4. • Researchers quantify and analyze the presence,
meanings and relationships of such words and
concepts, then make inferences about the
messages within the texts, the writer(s), the
audience, and even the culture and time of which
these are a part.

5. CONTENT ANALYSIS IS A
RESEARCH TECHNIQUE/METHOD
• Based on measuring/counting/reporting on the occurrence of
selected item/phenomena in a specific or representative
sample
• CAN employ both qualitative analysis - but tends towards
quantitative
• Provides
numbers and data suitable for computer
manipulation

11. • Toconduct a content analysis on any such text, the
text is coded, or broken down, into manageable
categories on a variety of levels--word, word sense,
phrase, sentence, or theme--and then examined
using one of content analysis' basic methods:
conceptual analysis or relational analysis.

12. Conceptual
CONTENT
ANALYSIS
Relational

13. CONCEPTUAL
• Countingindividual
occurrences of concepts
based on the number of
words or images

14. RELATIONAL
• Examining
the relationships
among concepts in a text...

15. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT
ANALYSING CONTENT?
Range and Counting
Formulate
size of and Interpreting
a problem
sample Coding

16. Formulate
a problem
•A hypothesis
• Something you wish prove
• Something you wish to find out

17. People represented as drink drivers in LTSA advertisements
What question would you be asking?

18. Range and
size of
sample
• What material are you going to analyse?
• Time-frame/genre/number of texts
• Practicality of researching sample size + & -

19. What would you sample?

20. AGE SEX
Counting 70+ M
50-70 F
and 30-50
Coding 20-30
-20
• What are you looking for? What are you going to count?
• Identify
the elements you are looking for ie. particular words
or images
the text... how will you identify each element when it
• Coding
occurs, what categories or groupings will you use?

21. Interpreting
• What conclusions can be drawn from the information?

22. • Who might commission this sort of research?
• How might the commissioning body of your
research influence what you look for?
• How might material approaching the topic from a
different angle skew your results?
• What is the value in this kind of research?

23. POSITIVE ELEMENTS OF
CONTENT ANALYSIS
• Inexpensive and Unobtrusive
• Candeal with large amounts of material (historical and
contemporary)
• Can deal with material
• Clearparamaters and specifications (you know what you are
looking for)
• Can allow inferences to be made
• Basis for comparisons ie. across time, across different media

24. NEGATIVE ELEMENTS OF
CONTENT ANALYSIS
• Time-consuming
• Assumes all things can be measured
• Seldom accounts for motivation, emotional dimensions,
contradictions or ambiguity
• Is beginning of research endeavours - not the end
• Requires tests of reliability eg. cross-coding
• Can be very tedious!

25. claim that [content analysis] provides
• ‘... the
completely value-free insights to the study of content is
highly questionable,
• Content analysis is an extremely directive method: it
give answers to the questions you pose... the method is
not well suited to studying ‘deep’ questions about
textual and discursive forms
• Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock (1999)

26. DISCOURSE V CONTENT
‘Discourse analysis involves the close
•
interpretation of (mainly) language; content
analysis involves the counting and measuring of
items, including words and images.’