Understanding and Applying Research Design

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CONTENT ANALYSIS

People who major in the social sciences are drawn to observing people, but people are not always the object of our study. Content analysis is the study of cultural artifacts, or the things that humans have created, rather than people themselves. Content analysis is what we call an “unobtrusive measure,” or a way of studying social behavior without directly affecting it. We’ve already looked at another unobtrusive measure—aggregate-level data analysis. Like aggregated data, content analysis does not directly look at individuals and thus is not “reactive” (Marshall and Rossman 1995). Content analysis can take anything that people have created, including comic strips, magazine articles, movies, books, pottery, meeting minutes, sales receipts, phone books, Web pages, fairy tales, song lyrics, and paintings, in order to examine what these artifacts can tell us about human life and interaction.

As one research design, content analysis is valuable in allowing us to examine communication systematically: what does a set of artifacts tell us about how, to whom, why, and what is communicated? For example, one early content analysis documented that the post–Civil War lynching of black men was not the result of black men raping white women, a commonly circulated myth. But why was this myth a common understanding of black men and/or of lynching? Drawing on the accounts of lynching reported in white newspapers, Ida B. Wells Barnett undertook a content analysis of newspaper ...