Case Studies and Content Analysis

Question 1

What is a case study?

Answer 1

• An in-depth investigation, description and analysis of a single individual, group, institution or event

Question 2

What is content analysis?

Answer 2

• A research tool used to indirectly observe the prescence of certain words, images or concepts within the media (e.g. advertisements, books,films etc)
• CA usually carried out on secondary data e.g. data already published

Turning qualitative data into quantitative data

Question 3

How does content analysis take place?

Answer 3

• Researchers quantify & analyse the prescence, meanings & relationships of words & concepts
• Then make infrences about the messages within the media

Question 4

How would you conduct a content analysis on any such media?

Answer 4

• The media is coded or broken down into manegable categories on a variety of levels- word, word sense,phrase, sentence or theme & then examined

Question 5

What researchers carried out content analysis?

Answer 5

Waynforth & Dunbar (1995)
Carried out a content analysis of Lonely hearts columns
They were investigating the hypothesis that men & women want different things from a romantic/sexual partner.
- The evolutionary explanation of behaviour says that women seek resources & security from a male partner & men seek youth & fertility from a female partner - this is because a female wants security & resources from the male for her & her child
A male seeks youth & fertility from a female partner so he can pass down his genes

Question 6

What are the strengths & limitations of case studies?

Answer 6

Strengths:
- Case studies are able to offer rich, detailed insights that may shed light on v unusual & atypical forms of behaviour- may be preferred to the more ‘superficial’ forms of behaviour that might be collected from an experiment or questionairre

Limitations:
- Generalisation of findings is an issue when dealing w such small sample sizes
- Furthermore the information that makes it into the final report is based on the subjective selection & interpretation of researcher - asw personal accounts from the ppts & their family & friends may be prone to inaccuracy & memory decay, especially if childhood stories are being told- means that evidence from case studies can be low in validity

Question 7

What are the strengths & weaknesses of content analysis?

Answer 7

Strengths:
- It is useful in that it can circumnavigate (get around) many of the ethical issues normally associated w psychological research
- Much of the material that an analyst might want to study, such as tv adverts/films/ads in newspapers etc may already exist within the public domain
- Thus there are no issues w obtaining permission- such communications have the benefit of being high in external validity & may access data of a sensitive nature provided the ‘authors’ consent to its use

Weaknesses:
- People tend to be studied indirectly as part of content analysis so the communications they produce are usually analysed outside of the context within which it occured- there is a danger that researcher may attribute opinions & motivations to speaker/writer that were not intended originally