Chapter 1 Flashcards
Quantitative content analysis
Systematic assignment of communication content to categories according to rules, and the analysis of relationships involving those categories using statistical methods.
Content analysis
Drawing representative samples of content, training human coders category rules developer to measure or reflect differences in content, and measuring the reliability (agreement or stability over time) of coders in the protocol. (Empirical approach)
Why use computers?
Utilize computers to complement human coding to deal with large amounts of texts.
Social science approach
Empirical observation and measurement. Identify questions or problems, concepts involved, possible explanations or relations.
Operational procedures
Developed and used to collect data on social media content, compared with data from official media.
Scientific method
Explanations derived through direct and objective observation and measurements
Communication social science
Reductionist view - Understanding comes through reducing a phenomena, to smaller basic parts
Holism
An assumption that wholes can be more than or different from the sum of their individual parts.
Content analysis is an essential step
In understanding the effects of communication effects
Content analysis role in this:
Causal role for communication content described in the models, tested and ascribed to content
Communication effects reflected
Variety of contingent conditions (message attended to alone or as part of the group)
Content analysis important:
Means of categorizing forms of content
CA has categorized entertainment content
Answer questions about how ethnic and gender stereotypes are learned.
Frame
Central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis and elaboration.
CA: important tool for exploring
Directly how individual level cognitive processes and effects relate to message characteristics.
Important differences messages effects and others less due to communicators or members intent than to different cognitive or other processes.
Content (antecedent):
Possible consequences of exposure to content range from attitude change to gratifications from media use. Content itself: consequence of a variety of other antecedent conditions or processes
Content consequence of:
Web page: consequence of news organizations selection array of stories, graphics and other content.
Page content; consequence of editors’ applications of news judgements.
Content researcher examines
Reflects all those antecedent choices and processes.
The “centrality” of content
Content viewed as an end product, consequence or evidence of antecedent contexts.
Validity
How closely the content evidence can be linked empirically to the context.
Most CA are not linked:
In a systematic way to either the forces for the content or the effects.
Descriptive content analysis:
First phase in a program of research.
CA: evolved in the use of:
Computational methods to complement human coding. Access, retrieve, categorize, filter and manage content units for researchers to manually code content
Algorithmic text analysis
(ATA= computer numeric values to attributes of media content based on rules). Machine learning or supervised machine learning or computer coding.
