COMM 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Codebook, Web Scraping, Content Analysis

• School: U of M
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 101
• Professor: Julia Lippman

Document Summary

Observational data: data collection from something that is observed in its natural state: involves taking something you can observe and operationalizing it into a variable. You can use coding to: determine the frequency of behaviors or events, categorize texts and open-ended responses to survey questions, quantify levels of an independent variable across stimuli. Coding lets you turn anything you observe in the world into something you can more concretely measure. Take away #1: if you can code it, you can measure it. Steps in a coding project: pick units of observation and analysis, produce a coding scheme for determining what counts as a code-able event, sample from some set of possible units, code from sampled units to produce variables. Content analysis: any project that codes for the presence of content in some media text: ex: you want to know how alcohol consumption on tv relates to violence on tv.