CONTENT ANALYSIS
    Topics Appropriate to Content Analysis
    Sampling in Content Analysis
    Coding in Content Analysis
    Illustrations of Content Analysis
    Strengths and Weaknesses of Content Analysis
 

    This section of the chapter will introduce you to content analysis, which uses recorded communications as data: speeches, letters, signs, song lyrics, advertisements, laws, editorials, etc.

    What you learned about sampling in Chapter 7 will apply here.  Usually, the content available for analysis exceeds the volume you can reasonably analyze, so you may have to select a sample of newspapers, paragraphs in a book, poems published by poets, etc.

    Coding is a key element in content analysis.  You will need to classify the items of content.  In manifest coding, specific, easily identifiable and countrable elements, like particular words in a document, can be the basis for coding.  In coding polemical tracts as racist or not, you might look for specific racial epithets.  In latent coding, you review the entire item of content and make a subjective judgment as to how it should be classified.  Thus, you'd decide whether a tract was racist or not based on your sense of the whole thing.  We'll see the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches.

    Content analysis has the advantage of being inexpensive, well within the means of students, for example.  On the other hand, it is limited to phenomena that can be represented in recorded communications of some sort.