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Summary for Content Analysis
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Exam summary for Content analysis. All 7 weeks of lecture and reading materials.
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‼EXAM!!!
Chapter 1: Introduction
Quantitative content analysis → research method → systematic assignment of communication
content to categories according to rules and the analysis of relationship involving those
categories using statistical methods.
Content analysis is about representation → how certain groups are represented.
Identify important relationship
Describe typical patterns
Social science approach → identify and solve (problem) theory-building
->
→ explanations derived from objective observations, rather than reasoning/idealism vs
empiricism content analysis is an empirical approach
Reductionist View: understanding comes Holism:
from reducing a phenomena to smaller, basic Whole can be more than or different from the
individual parts. sum of individual parts
Content Analysis → categorizing content
Powerful Effect: hyper needle effect
Limited Effect: more careful specification of factors that contributes effects of mass media
messages (no hyper needle)
Contingency Effect: effects of mass media depend on a variety of factors.
Frame: central organizing idea for news content supplies a context and suggests what the issue is
using selection, emphasis, exclusion, elaboration.
Content-Centered Model
EXAM!!! 1
, Content analysis central/integral to theory-building about both communication effects and
processes.
→ theory-building is not the only goal but also descriptive studies of content.
Content analysis is a method used to answer research questions about content.
Content analysis is uses computational methods to complement human coding →
algorithmic text analysis (ATA); application that assigns numeric values to attributes of
media content based on programmed rules → programmed rules
→ Content analysis is used in evolution of academic disciplines.
Why CA?
1. Content is central to process of communication.
2. Data from content analysis can be linked to data from a survey.
EXAM!!! 2
, 3. Content analysis offers insight into (and raises questions about) our mediated reality.
Chapter 2: Defining Content Analysis As A Social Science
Tool
Content analysis’ purpose and procedure draw on the social science approach to knowledge; a
system of standards and guidelines for generating relational statements that describe and explain
human behaviors and mental processes.
1. A method of organizing and categorizing things (typology)
2. Predictions of future events
3. Explanation of past events
4. A sense of understanding about what causes events
5. The potential for control of events
Goals of scientific process: theory-building and theory-testing.
3 characteristics of generating scientific knowledge that are consistent across time:
Science is abstract:
Range of behaviors to which social science applies.
A concept is independent of a particular time or place.
It's efficient in creating scientific understandings.
(e.g. agenda-setting is abstract, it allows the examination of the news media’s role in
every election)
Inter-subjectivity:
Scientists who study an area should agree on what a concept means and on the validity
of relationship among the concepts.
Logical rigor: agreement among scholars about the use of a logic system for developing
relational statements within a theory.
“Informal logic” or “natural language reasoning” → what communication scholar use as
a theory-building.
EXAM!!! 3
, Empirical relevance:
The ability to compare theoretical statements with objective empirical data.
Important part is the replicability; the ability of scientists to replicate the empirical
results of other scientists.
Media Visibility Analysis → type of quantitative content analysis in which the visibility of a
topic in one or multiple media sources or environments is exposed over time.
Content Analysis:
Content analysis is reductionist, reduce communication phenomena to manageable
data (e.g., numbers) from which inferences may be drawn about the phenomena
themselves.
FINAL DEFINITION: Content analysis is the systematic and
replicable examination of symbols of communication, which have been
assigned numeric values according to valid measurement rules, and the
analysis of relationships involving those values using statistical methods,
to describe the communication, draw inferences about its meaning, or infer
from the communication to its context, both of production and
consumption.
Content analysis is a research technique for the objective, systematic, and
‼
quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”
Systematic: Research requires generalizable empirical evidence, problem identification,
hypothesizing explanation and testing.
Goal → systematically build sets of theories.
Replicable:
Process of defining concepts in terms of actual, measured variables → operationalization
EXAM!!! 4
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