COMM 88 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Reductionism
Comm 88 Lecture 16
May 29, 2018
Content Analysis (quantitative)
ā¢Systematically, quantitatively examining the content of communication
ā¢Used to:
ā¢Describe how much/what kind of certain messages there are (e.g., sex on TV, types of
tweets)
ā¢Assess āimageā of particular groups in media (e.g., stereotypes of race, gender, age, political
party, etc.)
ā¢Compare media content to āreal worldā
ā¢Examine message changes over time
ā¢Produce background for research on media effects
ā¢Also a method for coding/analyzing open-ended data in surveys/experiments
ā¢Important procedures
ā¢Sampling
ā¢Deļ¬ne population of interest (ex: primetime TV shows, FB discussions)
ā¢Identify āunit of analysisā for coding (ārecording unitā)
ā¢Ex: for TV shows, code each episode? scene? character?
ā¢Ex: for FB, code each entry? thread? word?
ā¢Select representative sample (ideally)
ā¢Important issues
ā¢Coding: transforming content into numerical categories
ā¢Manifest content - visible, surface content
ā¢Latent content - underlying meanings
ā¢Establish inter-coder reliability!
ā¢At least 2 coders for the portion youāre coding
ā¢Ex: letās code this slide for āwordinessā
ā¢Limitations
ā¢Purely descriptive
ā¢Cannot explain why the content is that way
ā¢Cannot conclude anything about the effects of the messages
ā¢Very reductionistic
ā¢Reduces content to ācode-ableā concepts only
