Conclusion to Content Analysis Assignment

After having gone through the process of completing a content analysis assignment, there are a number of things I have learned throughout the experience. First, I discovered that it can be difficult in some instances to find the correct documents (in this case newspaper articles) needed to complete the content analysis procedure. Even though we as a class were given specific directions on how and where to find the desired articles, I still had difficulty gaining access to news articles from The Wall Street Journal due to the need for a subscription. I eventually did find access to relevant articles, but I did not find them in the way that was outlined in class. In a true, academic content analysis research study, I would have to follow exactly what the coding scheme says in order to get accurate and consistent results.

Another thing that I learned through this experience is how difficult it can be to code the tone of paragraphs as positive, negative, or neutral. This is a completely subjective task, and it is easy to see how there could be some disagreement in assigning scores between different coders. What one person sees as being a negative paragraph in tone, another person may read the same thing and see it as being neutral. I spent quite a bit of time contemplating how to code each paragraph. Since the accuracy of the results depend on coding the paragraphs with consistency between coders, I used my best judgement and tried to think about how others would code each paragraph as well.

I also found that something as simple as determining what kinds of people (Republicans, Democrats, Unknown/Other) are directly quoted in each article can be challenging. For example, in one of the articles a person was quoted who used to work in the Clinton Administration. However, it did not directly say if that person was a Democrat or a Republican. Even though it may be assumed that the person was a Democrat, Republicans can also work for presidents who are Democrats. So I had to make a judgment call whether to count this individual as being a Democrat or count them in the “Unknown/Other” category. This goes to show how something which seems to be straightforward can be difficult to determine when conducting a content analysis.

If we as a class collected all the articles from the four selected newspapers concerning our topic, coded them, and generated a database, there are a number of research questions and hypotheses that we would be able to come up with and test using this data.