As there are tests to assess the readability of food recipes from celebrity chefs, there are also techniques to determine the themes, dominant patterns, portrayal, and treatment of specific issues in newspapers, comics, TV and radio programs, posters, and even the new media such as websites and weblogs.
My undergrad DC132 class will carry out their individual content analysis projects and I came up with a simplified procedure to make their first foray into the world of content analysis easier. A short content analysis project can be done on any of these topics: 1) portrayal of women, children, alcoholism, smoking in films; 2) weekend commercial load on primetime of a leading TV station; 3) treatment of governance, corruption, environmental issues, health, economics, tourism, etc. in one week consecutive issues of a leading national newspaper; 4) structure and content of blogs (food, travel, politics, students, etc.). Here’s the procedure:
Step 1 - State your research question - or what do you want to find out?1.1 What are the structural characteristics and content of ______ blogs (student, food, travel, homemaking, political, etc.)?
1.2 How are environmental issues covered and treated in a major national broadsheet?
1.3 How is ________ (alcoholism, smoking, homosexuality, children, women) portrayed in primetime TV programs?
1.4 What types of news stories are prevalent in the early and late evening TV news?
1.5 What percentage of primetime TV news is … crime, accidents, graft and corruption, development issues?
1.6 What is the match between audience and type of commercials aired on primetime TV?
1.7 How are ________ (women, children, smoking, alcoholism) portrayed in films?
Step 2 - Outline your research plan to gather the information. Describe how you will observe, categorize, record and quantify your observations.
A constructed calendar will facilitate your sampling procedure. Prepare 7 boxes with each box representing the days of the week. On slips of paper, write the dates of all days of the week in one month and place them in separate boxes. Thus, there will be a Monday box, a Tuesday box, and so on. This is done to ensure that each day of the week is represented in your study. Depending on the sample size you have decided on (say, 35% of a year’s issues), randomly pick 2 to 4 slips from each box until you have drawn the required sample issues. Mark the sampled dates on a calendar to guide you in selecting the issues to be analyzed. In the sample constructed calendar below, the sample dates (in boldface) are January 2, 14, 25 and 29 representing a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
January 2008
|
Sun |
Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Step 3 - Gather and analyze the data
Step 4 - Write up your findings — in tables, charts and text
12 responses so far ↓
Monina Escalada // January 21, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Marlon, thanks. Akismet considered your email address as spam so I had to de-spam it to recover it. This is the second time your comment was trapped by Akismet. It is a telling feedback that you ought to create a new email user name.
Neil // January 29, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Our D132 class just had a short content analysis project.On behalf of our class, I would like to thank our professor for posting necessary information about the topic and further explaining it.
Before this project was tasked to us, I was quite confused on its steps but reading and rereading the posts in this blog answered my questions. The topic I chose to analyze was portrayal of women in Filipino films. Its objective is determining the values portrayed by women in selected Filipino films.We asked our teacher if the process is synonymous to film critiquing, but we found out that it is not.Both differ in process and objectives.The danger I discovered when doing this is the temptation of putting biases in analyzing the material. When I read the posts, I learned that content analysis should deal with the manifest content, or coding the data as it appears.This learning guided me in achieving the objectives of this short project.
Thank you Ma’am.
Marlon // January 29, 2008 at 9:59 pm
this is in relation to neil’s comment…
well, unlike neil, I did a content analysis on 5 travel blogs. The experience was really nice and helpful not only because it made me think that there are so many places yet to be discovered by me, but also I was able to experience how content analysis should be done.
At first it was really confusing but thanks to the specific procedures posted in Devcompage I understood how it should be done. In doing content analysis, you should identify the common trends that your subject blogs possess; not only on the comments posted or about the recent post but also the widgets and advertisements (which I failed to include in my report). You need to discuss the quantitative results summarized in your tables or will further explain them. This was the reason why most of us didn’t get high marks. Well, lesson learned…Thank you ma’am…
(ma’am this is my new mail address…well, at least for devcompage…hehe…for sure this won’t be a spam…)
Jojo Agot // January 31, 2008 at 10:22 pm
neil and marlon,
my BS thesis was about the portrayal of probinsyanos (promdis) in Philippine movies. in other posts here at devcompage, Ma’am Moni posted my personal email to her regarding my thoughts about my BS thesis. i wasn’t proud of it, in fact, after i graduated, i hid my copy at the bottom of my old manuals so i won’t see it again. oh well…
the central premise of my study was to find out how promdis were depicted in our Manila-centric movie industry. roughly, the findings showed women being depicted as prostitutes while men were shown as criminals, not because they wanted to but because they were driven by extreme poverty. not very encouraging at all and certainly not what you would publicize if you fancy nation building and all that stuff.
an extreme interpretation of the data could be that our local movie industry is somehow culpable for facilitating the chasm among our regions by immortalizing regional stereotypes on-screen.
anyway, for all its worth, i think the only redeeming value of my thesis is that i learned scientific procedure by heart and i understood what research actually is. five years later, when i was asked to conduct actual research by the city government of makati, i knew exactly what to do.
marlon // February 1, 2008 at 3:41 pm
response to sir Jojo’s entry:
Thanks you for sharing your experience and lessons learned to us sir.
Well, I think students usually don’t see the essence of what they are learning in school without seeing it before them. Usually it’s only on those situations that we appreciate the teachers’ efforts of teaching us these things, things that we think are boring, nonsense… As for me, I consider myself guilty of this (sometimes…hehe….). But now I know that these things ma’am Moni has been teaching us will surely help me in the future. Ma’am Moni has been telling us her stories about her experiences doing FGDs, surveys, research, and it really inspired me/us to do it right and learn it by heart.
Our recent activity is on audience research. Neil and I paired together and chose to focus on VSU’s instructional materials (inspired from ma’am moni’s post on IMs and comments…) for sure we’ll learn the process by heart…
Thank you again sir…
Neil // February 1, 2008 at 6:58 pm
in relation to Sir Jojo and marlon’s response:
Well, this comment is a good reminder that students should put their interests in what they do. I do believe that every output that students do become as good as what they expected when they don’t consider it as a burden.The short content analysis I did was interesting for me because the materials used were mostly the Metro Manila Film entries, so I enjoyed what I did. I really watched the four films in one day, and sometimes I went back to some scenes when I fail to remember something.
With regard to our audience research activity,Marlon and I are still making the instrument that we are going to use. We do hope that we can achieve our objectives for this activity.A nd I’m excited to learn more from this activity.
paulo // February 7, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Buenas tardes señoritos y señoritas…
I felt really happy when Ma’am Moni said that I got a perfect score in our content analysis exercise. I wasn’t really expecting to get that score. I thought of receiving just over 50% of the total points for that. I really had no idea what to do in making it, but I just followed my instincts and the way I understood the lecture. But it turned out to be right. ^_^.. I also thought that my output will be deducted for it was not computerized. But I was wrong. For our teacher, it’s the thought (content) that counts. ^_^
Ma’am, regarding your request if you can post my content analysis in the page, I greatly agree on it. It’s a great honor for me seeing my output featured here. Thanks a lot.
I just wrote my content analysis on four bond papers the morning before the deadline. But I had them (my data) analyzed the night before. I just finished writing nearly 1 pm the next day. Good thing my father has a motorcycle. So, I just hitched on him during that afternoon for he and mom are on their way to the city. And when I arrived at the Economics building, I took my run towards the classroom for I’m over 15 minutes late. I stepped into the room panting and catching my breath.
Anyway, my content analysis is about food websites. In the internet I searched for five of them. I set parameters or criteria for the analysis so as to set limitations in checking them. Examples are authorship or membership, color of the layout, interaction with site visitors, food focus, etc. Then, I constructed tables based on the parameters and categorized the food websites under them.
I also discussed the sites in paragraph form (based on the tables) for further comprehension. Here I presented ‘how many have this’ and ‘how many have that’, or ‘which of them lacks this’ and ‘which of them lacks that’.
Well, it’s a great thing to know how to conduct content analysis. This teaches you how to classify and identify dominant occurrences on your subjects, know their similarities and differences, etc. This will also aid you in formulating solutions to problems and come up with better strategies. I tell you, it’s fun. It’s worth the effort.
Sumera // July 2, 2008 at 5:09 am
My dissertation is on to look for how UK print media reported kosovo conflict and where the reportage biased or inadequate. I don’t know how to code categories. Could you please help me in this case. I am really confused.
Monina Escalada // July 2, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Sumera, for what degree or field of study are you doing your dissertation? I need that information to be able to help you better. If you were a communication student, the first step would be for you to have a theoretical framework which will guide your content analysis. What communication or social science theory is guiding your study? Are you doing content analysis to examine message framing effects or gatekeeper bias? Those theories would give you leads on the kinds of categories you need to construct for your content analysis.
I hope to get more details about your study.
How the rice crisis was presented in online news « // September 25, 2008 at 8:53 am
[...] 25, 2008 · No Comments My post on “How to do content analysis: a step-by-step guide” remains the top post of Devcompage which speaks of the demand for communication research [...]
NUMER ESCALANTE // November 16, 2008 at 1:34 pm
THANK YOU. What you have here enlightens me how content analysis should be done.
Monina Escalada // November 16, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Numer, if you have to conduct content analysis but still in the dark on specific procedures, keep in touch. I will be most willing to show you the way. Keep reading Devcompage and posting your comments. Thanks.
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