research methods - content analysis

• Method to analyse qualitative data. It is a technique that allows a researcher to take qualitative data and to transform it into quantitative data. You can only do a content analysis of something that people have created; we call these artefacts.
• o   Manifest content: what the text seems to be about “on the surface” e.g., a men’s lifestyle magazine might seem to be about cars and football.

  o   Latent content: what the text is about when you dig “beneath the surface” e.g., a men’s lifestyle magazine might contain many sexist depictions of women.
• Step 1: choose your artefacts e.g., if you are looking at gender stereotypes in car adverts that appear in magazines, you would need a wide range of different magazines to get a representative sample. If you only used men’s magazine, your sample would be biased, and you may not be able to generalise your results.
• Step 2: like an observation, the researcher must then create a coding system, breaking downs information into coding units. E.g., the number of swear words in a film.
• Step 3: the researcher would then tally each time either a man or a woman was seen doing a particular behaviour in the film.
• Qualitative data can be converted into quantitative data by counting instances of an event occurring, knowing as thematic analysis.