CHAPTER 10: SUMMARY, CONCLUSION(S) & RECOMMENDATIONS 199-208
4.3 Content Analysis: What Is It?
The current study employs both qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Content analysis is a term captured by the 1961 edition of the Webster English Language Dictionary as the
“analysis of the manifest and latent content of a body of communication (as a book or film) through classification, tabulation, and evaluation of its key symbols and themes in order to ascertain its meaning and probable effect” (Kripendorff, 2004). Broadly speaking, content analysis is defined as
“any technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying special characteristics of messages” (Holsti, 1968:608 cited in Berg, 2007:240). Deducing from Holsti‟s position, videotape, photos or anything that can be converted into texts are amenable to content analysis (Berg, 2007:240). “Content analysis is used to study a broad range of „texts‟ from transcripts of interviews and discussions in clinical and social research to the narrative and form of films, TV programs (sic) and the editorial and advertising content of newspapers and magazines”
(McNamara, 2005:1). By this, “[i]nterview, field notes, and various types of unobtrusive data are often not amenable to analysis until the information they convey has been condensed and made systematically comparable. An objective coding scheme must be applied to the notes or data. This process is commonly called content analysis” (Berg, 2007:238). Furthermore, content analysis is an
“empirically grounded method, exploratory in process, and predictive or inferential in intent”
(Kripendorff, 2004). Lastly,
[c]ontent analysis is a technique for gathering and analysing the content of text. The content refers to words, meanings, pictures, symbols, ideas, themes, or any message that can be communicated. The text is anything written, visual, or spoken that serves as a medium for communication. It includes books, newspapers or magazine articles, advertisements, speeches, official documents, films or videotapes, musical lyrics, photographs, articles of clothing, or works of art (Neuman, 2006:322).
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To buttress Neuman‟s stance, the meaning of visual and verbal units, that are content analysis objects, are defined by the medium that produced them as isolated, self-contained or separate such as paragraphs, framed images, pages or photographs. Whether verbal or not, I termed these texts. For instance, an advertisement displayed is a visual text (Bell, 2001:14-15).
4.3.1 Media Content Analysis: The Roots
Max Weber, in 1910, suggested the need to use content analysis to study newspapers during the premier meeting of the German Sociological Society (Neuman, 2006:322-223). However, in the context of research method, media content analysis is a specialised aspect of the well-known content analysis and was introduced by Harold Lasswell in 1927 as a systematic method for mass media studies, applied initially to propaganda studies. The popularity of media content analysis increased rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s as a method of investigating the content of movie communication.
Also, in the 1950s, the concept‟s position as a method in mass media and social sciences studies research escalated, especially with television‟s arrival (McNamara, 2005:1). Content analysis was ideal for this task because it enabled researchers to reveal the content - messages, meanings among others - in a source of communication such as a book, article and movie. Also, it provided the ability to probe into and discover content in a way that was different from the conventional way of reading a book or viewing a television programme (Neuman, 2006:323).
4.3.2 Applicability of Qualitative and Quantitative: Revisited in line with Content Analysis
Having considered qualitative and quantitative research methods as standalone approaches in the generic sphere above, in the arena of content analysis, one of its profound debates is whether qualitative or quantitative means should be used for its analysis (Berg, 2007:241). The validity and importance of dichotomising qualitative and quantitative approaches is also questioned under content analysis, just like the other fields of studies. Even if certain features of a text are changed into numbers, eventually, all readable texts are qualitative (Kripendorff, 2004:16). Thus, qualitative and quantitative blending should be sought for in analysing content on the argument that “qualitative analysis deals with the forms and antecedent-consequent patterns of form, while quantitative analysis deals with duration and frequency of form” (Smith, 1975; cited in Berg, 2007:421). No wonder, for many decades, content analysis has been deemed one of the most extensively cited
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media studies evidence, firstly, in relation to newspapers and radio (verbal and visual content can be analysed) and, later, turned to television and sometimes at the cinema. Thus, content analysis has been employed extensively as it seems to be the „common sense‟ way of researching media content, or for the reason that little theoretical analysis is needed (Bell, 2001:13). Similarly, it could be said that content analysis has developed into a range of research methods that promise to produce inferences from all forms of verbal, pictorial, symbolic, and communication data. After its 1970s brief stagnation, content analysis has exponentially grown (Kripendorff, 2004:17). See Table 4.0 below for its penetration and use compared with other methods on the basis of a 2003 Internet search via Google.
Table 4.0: Content Analysis Usage as a Method Methods Content
Analysis
Survey Research
Psychological Test
Hits 4,230,000 3,999,000 1,050,000
Source: Kripendorff, 2004:17, as at August, 2003
4.3.3 Content Analysis: Procedural Measures
As shown above, content analysis may come in different forms as visual, verbal, graphic or oral. That is, it is applicable to any form of meaningful information whether visual or verbal. To carry out an analysis is to break something down into its constituent elements (Bell, 2001:14-15).
„Breaking down‟ we mean the classification of the subject under consideration into manageable units to aid coding and collating. This process identifies that “content analysis is useful for studying a broad range of „texts‟ from transcripts of interviews and discussions in clinical and social research to the narrative and form of films, TV programs and the editorial and advertising content of newspapers and magazines” (McNamara, 2005:1). Furthermore, the workflow of content analysis covers instituting categories, and then counts the number of times in which they are used in a text or image.
It is an analysis that partly utilises quantitative method in determining the frequencies of the occurrence of particular categories (Joffe and Yardley, 2004:56). Content analysis is carried out either as manifest content or latent content (Berg, 2007:242; Neuman, 2006:325; Babbie, 2008:356).
Manifest content is where those targeted elements are present physically and can be counted by the researcher (Berg, 2007:242; Babbie, 2008:356); whereas latent content is where coding is done by
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looking out for the underlying, implicit meaning in the content of a text. For example, a researcher reads an entire paragraph and decides whether it contains stimulating themes or a romantic mood (Neuman, 2006:326; Babbie, 2008:356). Both the manifest and latent content coding were employed for this work. This makes content analysis an appropriate method with which to code the placement of advertisement (as manifest) and editorials / headline news (as latent) through agenda- setting/framing in state and privately-owned newspapers amidst interviews to determining media independence in Ghana under the Fourth Republic from the perspective of media funding.
A typical flowchart depicting the process of content analysis research by Neuendorf (2002) was adopted for this exercise (cited in Mcnamara, 2005:19-20). This is depicted in Table 4.0 over page.
94 Figure 4.0: Media Content Analysis Flowchart
*CS: Coding Schemes / HMC: Human-Mediated Coding / CMC: Computer-Mediated Coding Source: Adapted from (Neuendorf, 2002; cited in Mcnamara, 2005:19-20)