Week 11: Quantitative Research Methods (Content Analysis)

Content analyses create detailed profiles of media content ant identify trends in content over time. However, they can not be used to draw conclusions about the effects of the media because the audience often perceives media in different way than the researchers—or the producers of the content.  Content analysis is a time-consuming task, so researcher sometimes takes only a limited sample and sometimes uses censer study (selecting the whole documents for analysis. Content analysis is the quantitative description of the content of media. Researchers begin with systematic sample of media content and apply objective definitions to classify its words, images, pictures, and themes. The purpose of content analysis is to describe trends in communication content, to audit communication content against standards, to audit techniques of persuasion, to analyze style, and to describe patterns of communication.

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