Scientific Methods in Media Effects Research

Reading Summary

The chapter outlines one of the main methods used to answer questions related to media interpretation in content analysis. This process describes the interest and allows for one to draw their own inferences from the gathered facts. This technique is inherently objective, as most reasonable researchers should examine the same, trustworthy quantitative research and reach the same non-quantitative conclusion. This is because content analysis deals with manifest content, which places emphasis on the information and does not demand much interpretation and reading between the lines.

The chapter then outlines the steps toward designing a content analysis research project. To begin, researches gather their sample of data that will be used to conduct the analysis. Secondly, they must develop a unit of analysis do decide how they would like to break up the contents and analyze each unit. Next, these contents must be coded in a category scheme, meaning that each unit of analysis will be divided and separated into each area of research interest. Researchers must then reach a coding agreement where they compare agreement between their codings, usually seeking a coding reliability of at least 70% (meaning they agreed on at least 70% of decisions). Once this coding reliability is established, a statistical analysis is conducted in order to determine the validity of the hypotheses, and then an interpretation of the findings is concluded.

Outside Example

I struggled to come up with an example because my media feed tends to lack the statistical analysis of normal media such as TV or movies. However one thing I’ve seen periodically and that fascinates me is the influence of cable television over political views, in particular Fox News. This Vox article outlines how initial observations about Fox’s influence over ideologies and voting patterns was confirmed in staggering statistics. This is through their dramatically greater appeal of strong conservatives and invoking confirmation bias, as well as a greater ability to influence non-Republicans than channels like MSNBC ability to influence non-Democrats.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/8/16263710/fox-news-presidential-vote-study

Reading Connection

The article as well as the study attached lays out each individual step of the content analysis process. Researchers gathered relevant data on the slants of the three largest political news channels as well as viewership preferences and those correlations to voting patterns and social views. Various units of analysis and category schemes were used in order to decipher the true influence and impact of media on politics. For example, they analyzed the evolution of the ideological slants of networks, the influence of different voter groups, and those translations into voting and public opinion changes. There was a statistical analysis of each of these results, which gave merit to the interpretations and conclusions of Fox News viewership directly creating rightward shifts in viewers’ attitudes. This is also clearly a manifest content analysis, as information was placed at the center of the report in order to present an undoubtedly clear conclusion. In general, this article and study articulate how media consumption does have affects and those effects can be discovered.