Blog Post #2 for Monday’s reading on January 27, 2020

Reading Summary

Glenn Sparks poses the question, “how would one ever go about discovering the effects of media content?” She states that it is through three scientific approaches, content analysis, surveys, and experiments. Content analysis are rigorous analysis of the media content, but do not allow someone to understand the effects. Content analysis allow for your claims to have some merit in the sense that content analysis can show what media contains. Coding agreements and statistical analysis play a role in determining how reliable your content analysis is. The interpretation of the data is what decides if your claim has merit based on your analysis. 

Source: Glenn Sparks (2013) “Analyzing content” in Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview. 2013. 

Outside Example 

I have thought about how the media I consume affects me multiple times. I particularly have thought about how what media I consumed as a child and how it differed from my friends. Some of my friends whose parents didn’t let them watch certain movies or shows when they were younger tend to have been more sheltered. Me and my friends have talked about whose parents let them see an R rated movie first. What really made me start thinking about this is my sister who is terrified of boats or ships or anything on the water. She watched Titanic when she was 7. She now will admit that is what made her so scared of water and she has still not gotten over it. 

Article about teenage media consumption

Reading Connection

Sparks talks about how you need to use scientific ways to prove how media consumption effects the consumers. I have my sister who has had media effect her. I understand that media consumption needs to have a scientific way to prove its effects, but I can reasonable assume for myself that media effects people and it effects each person differently. That is my own nonscientific assumption though, so it has no merit. Content analysis could help support my idea that media has images that could be considered scary in them, but it couldn’t prove my assumption about how it effects people like my sister.