Content Analysis

You need to know:
 * What content analysis is
 * What researchers must be aware of while conducting content analysis
 * How content analysis is conducted
 * Reliability

What is content analysis
A research method used to measure the number of times a behavior or event occurs within one or several forms of media.

Conducting content analysis
Researchers who wanted to see how much aggression occurred on television would use content analysis as a research method. They would have to take a number of steps to do this:
 * Decide what aggressive behaviour is.
 * Develop a list of behaviours or categories that could be measured as aggressive.
 * Decide on the sample they need to study
 * Tally the number of times aggression occurred

How is content analysis conducted
Tallying: The researcher uses a tally to record how many times they witnessed the aggressive acts on their list. These are added up to give the total number of aggressive acts so that they can decide how much aggression is on television.

Choice of categories: The list of behaviours needs to be a good example of what is being measured. Sometimes pushing may not be a good measure of aggression, especially when the children are only playing a game.

Sampling: Good content analysis depends on looking at a good sample of programmes. Even the time of day or type of programme can lead to a biased sample. See Watershed for an explanation.

Reliability of content analysis
Each researcher has their own views, and this means that the results of a study might not be reliable. This could lead to researchers coming to different conclusions.