SOCI 702 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Tim Wise, Nikki Giovanni, Microsoft Research
Document Summary
Different sociologists employ a variety of different methods in their research, from semi-structured interviews to rhetorical analysis, to examine how media represents people and social relationships. One of the most popular methods for studying media representations is known as content analysis. Content analysis is a method that counts the frequency with which a motif occurs within texts. In sociology a text can be any cultural product: a film, a television show, a song, and so forth. Content analysis occurs outside of the field of sociology as well. Picture association of america, for example, uses a kind of content analysis to rate films. The group will count the number of times a specific profanity is said or a violent act occurs and, based on the final number, determine the rating of a specific film. So if a researcher wanted to track how violent a movie was, the researcher would count the number of times a violent act occurs.
