‘Accordingly, qualitative content analysis relies heavily on researcher ‘readings’ and interpretation of media texts. This intensive and time-consuming focus is one of the reasons that much qualitative content analysis has involved small samples of media content and been criticized by some researchers as unscientific and unreliable.
… Qualitative analysis of texts is necessary to understand their deeper meanings and likely interpretations by audiences – surely the ultimate goal of analysing media content.
So a combination of the two seems to be the ideal approach.’ (p.5)

Macnamara, J. 2005. Media content analysis: Its uses; benefits and best practice methodology, Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal, 6(1), 1–34.

Step I. Keep it feasible!

To keep the analysis feasible, we apply what is called ‘the rule of three.‘ 
In a study in which you study the representation of gangs in a specific city for instance, you are interested what crime types are often associated to gangs in the media. As you can imagine many forms of crime are associated to gangs and some articles may mention more than 10 different offences. That would mean that you would have to create for every crime mentioned a separate variable (VAR1: Offence 1, VAR2: Offence 2, VAR3: Offence 3, VAR4: Offence 4, VAR5: Offence 5, etc.). Your database would become very large and the analysis would become too complex. That is why many media analyses only take the first three crime types metioned into account and leave the rest out.

Watch a Video about the rule of three HERE

 

Step II. Coding and Recoding

To start the analysis of text, a first step is to discover themes and patterns in the media text. A good way to start, is to categorise piece of text (often referred to as coding). This process is often referred to with the concept of ‘open coding.‘ It entails you reading through your data and starting to create tentative labels for information in your text. These labels summerise/describe the selected pieces of text.  This is only the first step in an analysis. In a purely quantitative analysis you would proceed with axial coding for instance (looking for relationships). We on the other hand will, once discovered themes, go back to the text to extract its’ meaning. The only way to find these themes/codes/categories is to work with your data (reading, trying out categories, altering themes, merging subthemes, improving categories, …). This often involves redoing the analysis.

Many of you are researching the representation of a particular crime, so think of  what elements constitute a good crime story. A journalist would need information on:

1. The victim
2. The offender
3. The event
4. The Crime scene
5. The context (info contextualising the event – for instance referring to similar cases, crimes or …

These become the ‘content variables’ in your database. Watch the video HERE

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