Develop a set of rules for codingĬoding involves organizing the units of meaning into the previously defined categories. To get more detailed data, you also code for other categories such as their political party and the marital status of each politician mentioned. Based on your research question, you have to categorize based on age and the concept of trustworthiness. Your units of analysis are the politicians who appear in each article and the words and phrases that are used to describe them. trustworthy, corrupt, conservative, family oriented). aged 30-40, lawyer, parent) or more conceptual (e.g. Categories can be objective characteristics (e.g.

The set of categories that you will use for coding.

For example, are you going to record the frequency of individual words and phrases, the characteristics of people who produced or appear in the texts, the presence and positioning of images, or the treatment of themes and concepts?

The unit(s) of meaning that will be coded.

Next, you need to determine the level at which you will analyze your chosen texts. Define the units and categories of analysis Because this is a very large volume of content, you choose three major national newspapers and sample only Monday and Friday editions. To research media representations of younger and older politicians, you decide to analyze news articles and opinion pieces in print newspapers between 2017–2019. You can conduct content analysis at any time, in any location, and at low cost – all you need is access to the appropriate sources. When done well, content analysis follows a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated by other researchers, yielding results with high reliability.

You can analyze communication and social interaction without the direct involvement of participants, so your presence as a researcher doesn’t influence the results. Analyzing the consequences of communication content, such as the flow of information or audience responses.Revealing differences in communication in different contexts.

Identifying propaganda and bias in communication.Understanding the intentions of an individual, group or institution.

Finding correlations and patterns in how concepts are communicated.To gain a more qualitative understanding of employment issues in political campaigns, you could locate the word unemployment in speeches, identify what other words or phrases appear next to it (such as economy, inequality or laziness), and analyze the meanings of these relationships to better understand the intentions and targets of different campaigns.īecause content analysis can be applied to a broad range of texts, it is used in a variety of fields, including marketing, media studies, anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and many social science disciplines.

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