Research Methods in Politics 18

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Research Methods in Politics18

• Content Analysis

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Teaching and Learning Objectives

• to consider alternative definitions of content
  analysis
• to compare qualitative and quantitative content
  analysis
• to consider the sub-types of content analysis
• to learn how to carry out content analysis using
  latest available software.

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Content Analysis

• textual analysis
• text mining
• longstanding method
• Cold War application, CIA, GCHQ
• text, video, phone cons, e-mails
• many advantages plenty of it
• disadvantages
• new technology

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Content Analysis

• qualitative
• highly interpretative
• detecting bias
• Democracy
• quantitative

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BLAIR co-operation human rights peace and
prosperity peace and development hope rule of
law respect for others liberty rather than
freedom stability partnership tolerance justice H
hard work asylum merit worth
CHIRAC liberty responsibility freedom with
dignity multilateralism state sovereignty rule of
law under UN equal dignity of all
cultures respect for diversity dialogue
BUSH fear tyranny taxes
from censorship FREEDOM to choose raise
families vote assemble worship GOD
DEMOCRACY LIBERTY opposite of
communism responsibility to defend vigilance,
security military action sacrifice intervent
ion pre-emption cant be neutral
SCHROEDER institutions to guarantee human
rights popular participation shared
trade sustainable development
disarmament full state sovereignty social
and material security minority rights
BURLESCONI freedom and democracy defence of human
rights Peace and development freedom from
totalitarianism route from poverty
PUTIN market economies decent
standard of living choice
anti-totalitarianism myth of partnership
(NATO) caliphate
Content Analysis of Post 9/11 on Democracy
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Quantitative Content Analysis

• Zipfs Law power-law function Pi 1/ia
• Key words, e.g. George W Bush, Inaugural 2005
• Key Word Frequency
• freedom 27
• liberty 15
• hope 8
• history 7
• tyranny 5
• God 4

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Structural Content Analysis

• space (or time) devoted to the text
• volume headline type and font size
• position or prominence of the text
• use of accompanying illustrations or photographs
• indications of direction or bias (for example, by
  stereotyping)
• persistence over time (for example, the Daily
  Mails campaign over asylum seekers and the
  Daily Express pre-occupation with Princess Diana)

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Newspaper Circ (000s) Headline The
Times 635 NHS faces treatment rationing The
Guardian 365 11 government ministers fighting
NHS cuts Daily Telegraph 899 Browns manifesto
for Britishness The Independent 238 Shoot the
messenger Blair blames press for anti-war
mood Daily Express 773 Big new tax on house
owners Daily Mail 2,311 Now a school
bans crucifix The Mirror 1,540 Big
brother shot my dad dead The Sun
3,026 Shoot him, mums anger at beast who
raped girl, 3 The Star 750 Big
Bro on skids TV news (audience for
post-watershed news, 000s) BBC News c
5,000 Reid moves to quell offender row ITN news
c 3,000 Boys killed by Tube
train Sky News c 2,000 Men killed in Tube
tragedy National Newspapers, circulation and
headlines, 13.01.2006
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Substantive Content AnalysisBritish parties
ideological movement on a left-right scale
1945-97 (Budge, 1999 5, Fig 11.1)
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Content Analysis Software

• AutoMap, CatPac, General Inquirer, Hamlet II,
  Leximancer, TACT, Textpack, Texstat, VBPro,
  Wordsmith, Winmax
• The core functions include
• calculating word frequencies
• excluding stopwords (the, and, in etc.)
  automatically
• adopting lemmitisation to combine words with the
  same stem, e.g., go, going, gone,
• using synonyms to categorise as one word all
  others having the same meaning, e.g., gone, quit,
  departed,etc
• recording concordance by showing each word in its
  context (termed KWIC key words in context)
• using cluster analysis to group together words
  used in similar contexts
• using co-word citation to identify the
  concurrence of key words. This is used by the US
  governments Echelon Project to scan emails for
  terrorist activity. So emailers using a
  combination of, say, bomb and Islam are
  likely to automatically attract the attention of
  the security services.

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Hamlet II

• European design for Politics content analysis
• Hamlet offers a number of analytical procedures
  including
• Joint Frequency Analysis
• Jaccard coefficient
• simple cluster analysis
• multi-dimensional scaling
• Procustean Individual Difference Scaling
  (PINDIS)
• KWIC (key words in context)
• Wordlist
• Compare (to compare two or more texts)
• Profile (which displays the distribution of words
  and sentence lengths)

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HAMLET - Computer-assisted Text Analysis -
17/01/2007 173257
The text is read from the file
State of the Union Address 2005.txt Counting
collocations within a span of 50 words - WARNING
No collocates for "freedom" WARNING some
characters were not recognised when reading this
file! WORD-SEARCHING IS INSENSITIVE TO CASE.
There are 17 main entries in the search list. No
synonyms / related items are recognised
CATEGORY/WORD COUNTS .............................
....... VOC.LST. FREQUENCY VOC.LST.
TEXT CONTEXT UNITS Applause 67
36.61 1.30 67 better world
6 3.28 0.12 6 budget
3 1.64 0.06 3
democracy 8 4.37 0.15
8 economy 11 6.01
0.21 11 free 27
14.75 0.52 27 God
1 0.55 0.02
1 history 5 2.73
0.10 5 hope 3
1.64 0.06 3 justice
4 2.19 0.08 4 liberty
7 3.83 0.14
7 sacrifice 1 0.55
0.02 1 society 5
2.73 0.10 5 tax
6 3.28 0.12 6 terror
27 14.75
0.52 27 tyranny 2
1.09 0.04 2
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Dendogram
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(No Transcript)
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Content Analysis Pros and Cons

• the ready availability of texts
• the scope for comparative analysis
• easy-to-use (with practice) analytical software
• good tabulations of results
• eye-catching illustrations

• concurrence of key words does not necessarily
  indicate causal links
• the meanings of key words change over time and
  can be deliberately changed by political parties
  who exploit feel good or feel bad words to
  make their policies more attractive (e.g.,
  community, homeland)
• overall, the analysis is not really conclusive
  enough to provide sufficiently reliable evidence
  to confirm your research hypothesis

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Questions for Discussion or Assignments

• Where and when should content analysis best be
  used?
• Compare and contrast two or more of the available
  software packages
• Working in teams, complete a structural content
  analysis of last weeks national TV and print
  news media accounts of national and international
  news from Monday to Sunday. What inferences and
  conclusions can you draw?
• Complete a content analysis of all President
  George W. Bushs State of the Union Addresses.
  Compare the analyses. What are your main
  conclusions? What are their limitations? Select
  two quality newspapers. Using CD-ROMs or Internet
  sources, evaluate their (emergent) bias for or
  against the Republican and Loyalist movements in
  N Ireland between the Good Friday Agreement
  (1998) and the St Andrews Agreement (2006). What
  conclusions can you draw? What reasons can you
  suggest for any changes of support?