QUANTITATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS
Having watched a program like Review of the Year 1998, the audience, being
instinctively analytical, or semiotic, creatures, is left with certain general
impressions of what the program was ‘about,’ and how this ‘content’ is likely to
affect both viewers like themselves and the larger society represented.
Predictably, there will be critical comments about women being depicted as
secondary in political and economic matters, about a supposedly serious news
review spending too much time on the trifles of the entertainment world, or about
Third World events being all but ignored in an increasingly global society. In
interpersonal everyday discussions, people will next try to substantiate their
claims by referring to specific program elements, but because lay discussion is
rarely sustained beyond impressions or speculations, it is difficult to determine
who is right and who is wrong. One task of media and communication research, in
the garb of ‘content analysis,’ is to address such issues, supposedly on behalf of a
democratic society as an input to, and influence on, political and public debates
about how its citizens and their concerns should collectively be portrayed by the
media.
In order to interpret the implications of findings regarding both gender and
other categories, content analysts need a standard of comparison. If one
subscribes to the first-phase focus on media as separate from other social
structuration, one may refer to ‘reality itself,’ as documented typically with official
statistics regarding, for instance, the proportion of women and men in parliaments
or occupational roles. If, instead, one relies on the second-phase premise
regarding the mutual constitution of societies and their symbolic forms, an
internal standard suggests itself, such as previous ‘reviews of the year’ going back
five, ten, or twenty years, perhaps conferring, as well, with other genres. Additional
sources of comparison arise from the distinction between public service and
commercial channels, and between print media and this broadcast medium.
