Research methods: Content analysis.

The idea

Content analysis turns existing media—adverts, diaries, tweets—into data, observing artefacts rather than people. The procedure involves sampling material, agreeing coding units in advance, and tallying appearances. Coding yields quantitative frequency counts that can be graphed. Thematic analysis instead lets recurring qualitative ideas emerge as themes, which are re-applied to fresh material for verification. For example, Manstead and McCulloch coded 170 British TV adverts, finding men often in autonomous roles and women in dependent ones. The material is real and unaffected by being studied, eliminating demand characteristics, but coding relies on subjective judgement, meaning inter-rater reliability must be established.

What earns the marks

• Defined as an indirect observational technique applied to communications and artefacts rather than to people behaving in front of a researcher.
• Procedure in order: sample the material, decide and operationalise the coding units or categories, code systematically, count or summarise.
• Coding produces quantitative frequency data; thematic analysis produces qualitative themes that are then tested against new material.
• A named example with its finding, such as Manstead and McCulloch’s coding of 170 television adverts showing men in autonomous and women in dependent roles.
• Strengths: the material was produced for real purposes, so external validity is high, and studying it creates no demand characteristics.
• Strengths: publicly available material raises few ethical problems, and clearly stated coding units make the study replicable.
• Limitations: observer bias in deciding what counts, material analysed outside the context that produced it, and categories that carry the researcher’s own culture.
• Reliability established by a second researcher coding the same material independently and the two sets of tallies being correlated.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Describing it as an experiment, or as simply reading through the material and writing an impression of it.

• Offering coding categories that are interpretations, such as "sexist", instead of countable units such as "the number of adverts with a male voice-over".

• Losing the distinction between coding, which is quantitative, and thematic analysis, which is qualitative.

• Asserting there are no ethical issues at all, when private material such as diaries or therapy notes still needs consent.

Exam tips

• Answer "how would you carry this out" as an ordered procedure, with the coding units taken from the material named in the stem.
• Say which type of data the method will produce, because that decides the graph and the statistical test in later parts of the question.
• Evaluate by comparison: contrast it with interviewing the same people, where demand characteristics would appear.
• If the question says analyse qualitatively, describe themes emerging and being verified, not a tally chart.