COMM 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Content Analysis, Random Assignment

• School: U of M
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 102
• Professor: Nojin Kwak

Document Summary

Investigating people by asking them questions directly: standardized questionnaire, contact methods of survey. Time consuming telephone, mail, email, web surveys easy, reaches many people. Fax and text message polls: selection of respondents, sampling, population and sample, random sampling: Everyone has an equal chance of being selected into the sample: usually used in a survey, high generalizability, randomization (random assignment, powerful tool to eliminate alternative explanations, usually used in an experiment. Longitudinal survey: surveys that gather data from some sample over some number of time periods > correlation + temporal order. Example: is harry potter violent: unit of analysis: what you are measuring and how you"re measuring it. Inter-coder reliability: are all people looking for and measuring the content in the same way: strengths, unobtrusive because there is no impact on what is studied, can study processes over long periods of time, including retroactively.