Content Analysis

Summary

Content analysis is used to describe media phenomenons with precision and is a way to analyze media affects. Content analysis describes media content in a systematic and rigorous way. While it can establish trends associated with certain media, it does not establish a cause/effect relationship between media and certain behaviors. Content Analysis uses a sample to analyze, a unit analysis to define the content, categories to further describe the media, coding rleiability to identify the significance of their findings, and then, finally, interpret their findings into statistics.

Example

My connection to the reading is the idea that an increase in school shootings is directly related to violent video games. There has been an increase in school shootings in the last decade and many news sources accused violent video games of being the reason for this. Everytime there was another shooting there would be a resurgence of stories questioning the affect of video games on children’s brains.

Connection

The idea that the increase in school shootings are being caused by the popularity of violent video games was eventually disproven through a study that used content analysis. Content analysis was used to study video games with violent content and then compared them to people’s violent tendencies.