COMM 88 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Codebook, Content Analysis, Reductionism
Document Summary
11/30: lecture 17 - content analysis + qualitative research (separate) Systematically and quantitatively examining the content of communication. Content analysis: a method for studying and retrieving meaningful information from documents; finding evidence in textual and symbolic content. Ex: how many times ? how much accumulated time do ? . Coding: transforming content into numerical categories manifest content (visible, surface content) and latent content (underlying meanings) content into categories. Make well-defined coding scheme and then put into a codebook; Codebook: a list of the variables to be coded; akin to operationalizing. Multiple coders are often necessary to ensure reliability variables; gives consistency. Used on oral texts (ex: interview transcripts), audio-visuals (ex: videos), visuals (ex: art pieces), and written texts (ex: includes hypertexts like webpages, ads) Define population of interest, identify unit of analysis for coding. Very reductionistic = reduces content to code-able concepts only; may miss out on deeper meanings in the text.
