Advertisements
Skip to content
April 24, 2018 / C H Thompson

Content Analysis

  • Content analysis is another popular for of media research (the previous slides were discussing experimental method in laboratory’s)
  • Content Analysisis a quantitative approach to analysing mass media content
  • It involves developing a system of classification to analyse the key features of media sources and then simply counting how many times these features occur in a given text.
  • The simplest form of content analysis is a word or phrase count, which these days can be done on millions of books which have been scanned into Google’s database,
  • more complex forms involve looking at broader categories of content – which types of crime appear in news media for example, or what are the major categories of news (entertainment/ sport/ politics) – or one can analyse pictures to see the representation of men compared to women for example.

Evaluative Points

  • It minimises researcher bias and typically has good reliability because there is less room for the researcher’s interpretations to bias the analysis.
  • It is quicker to do than qualitative forms of content analysis.
  • Weaknesses emerge when you start to use broader categories – which can be interpreted differently by different people.
  • Simply counting the content of a media text tells you nothing about the context in which it takes place, or the broader meaning which the words or pictures convey.
Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

w

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://sociologytwynham.com/2018/04/24/content-analysis-2/
sociologytwynham.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
105894
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:S6SK64LX2ZB6WDUUV3CXQD3TXDY6XBHM
<urn:uuid:f922ddb0-c0d8-4b51-9777-6e76a491d600>
2018-05-24T11:33:28Z
192.0.78.24
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:43E5T4UBXMZDFLZSUHMDZEZ437NQDRXS
<urn:uuid:3f8dc442-4dd3-4564-aaf4-041f6927ea60>
https://sociologytwynham.com/2018/04/24/content-analysis-2/
length
response
<urn:uuid:f91ac996-097f-4d35-859d-895ad59e143e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-63-110-132.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf