COMM 3900 / Communication Research Methods

The Content Analysis Paper

The purpose of a content analysis paper is to systematically or scientifically study the content of some media product to order to draw conclusions about that content.   Keep in mind that, as social scientists, you are looking for patterns of meaning and so you want to generalize about a type of media product (news, for example, or movies) rather than do a literary analysis of one particular product (a news story, for example, or a single movie) or one particular person (George Lucas, for example, or George Will).

Let’s imagine that you believe the news media are biased in favor of liberals.*   You would want to do an analysis of the content of news media products in order to see if there is any evidence to support your belief. But this is a very complicated thing to examine because:

You have to define and then operationalize liberal in a way which makes sense to both liberals and conservatives. By liberal, do you mean President Clinton? Or do you mean Democrats as opposed to Republicans? Or do you mean certain political positions such as pro-choice, or anti-death penalty, or certain stances concerning taxes, education, business, and/or the environment? If you mean President Clinton, then you would have to compare treatment of Clinton to treatment of previous (recent) conservative presidents.

You have to define and operationalize bias. What is it and how do you know it when you see it?

You have to tell us which medium you are referring to. Do you mean newspapers, news magazines, local television news, national television news, or radio news?

You have to sample from the media (e.g., which newspapers are representative of newspapers in general?) and you have to sample from within the representative selection. (See Diagram News Media Sampling.)

You have to define your unit of analysis (i.e. stories, paragraphs, headlines/captions, sentences, newspapers). This is particularly important if you are using quantitative analysis because you need to know if you are going to say that X percentage of the stories are biased toward liberalism or X percentage of the remarks or headlines or editions are biased toward liberalism.