Understanding Research (35 page)

Content analysis is generally regarded as a specific term for quantitatively inflected research into written, and now audio-visual texts. But it can also be regarded as a wider term for inquiries into any sort of meaning-making that treats messages, content, and meaning as an interaction between the manifest and latent message/s on the one hand, and reception (how others make sense of these meanings) on the other.

For the time being bear in mind that when opting for a conventional content analysis approach, the following methodological distinctions are in play:

1. In the one instance, researchers treat content primarily as self-contained and unidirectional, i.e. meaning resides in the message itself and largely at the point of its production (the sender and message are in a one-to-one relationship).
   
2. In the other, researchers regard the meaning as an interplay between what is produced (manifested) and its reception (how others receive and respond to the message); how messages are transmitted and circulated is also studied in other cases.
   

The difficult part here for anyone interested in this sort of inquiry, from archivists to media researchers and policy analysts, is the way these two paths (and the ever-increasing degrees of specialized techniques and vocabularies that go with them) appear to head off in opposite directions immediately. In many respects this is true; content analysis has developed in Anglo-American media and communications, and political research institutions as a largely quantitative enterprise.

Its counterpart, textual/discourse analysis, has followed a particularly continental path, spliced in turn by changes in the way scholars and theorists have staked various levels of commitment to
structuralist
frameworks. In other words, whether all meaning/s reside in the way language is structured – all is coded and so can be deciphered methodically, or rather in the way language is received – the code is over-determined by a variety of factors, such as the vagaries of human psyche and culture.

Practically however, and contingent upon the inquiry in hand, it is more productive when starting to consider how you might carry out a research project to gather this sort of data that these poles are not necessarily diametrically opposed. For research looking to work primary with texts (broadly defined), consider the following:

• (i)  If your project gives you reason to analyse the content of a set of written texts, television programmes, or website content then the outcome may be useful for setting up a workable set of parameters, trying out which criteria comprise your eventual ‘coding scheme’ or get you more acquainted with the content itself. In all cases as an object of research it needs more than a first reading.
  
• (ii)  It could be that your project sees you working entirely from the presumption that this content is the object of inquiry, its examination the lion’s share of your original research component, its frequency and placement of key terms, references or framing crucial to your investigation. As such the design and setting-up of your analytical scheme requires time and attention. The methods by which you intend to carry out this sort of content analysis thereby need elucidation, to make sense of your research question.
  
• (iii) It could be that a dual approach is an option. If so, why? What are the limits you need to set to achieving both sorts of analysis?
  

These approaches to content use another notion of ‘text’ whereby the production and reception of a message involves more than one sort of response: this could be emotional, intellectual, or even physical. In addition, these responses generate another set of meanings: texts. In short, this analytical approach is based on the premise that ‘no text is an island’, stands outside society; hence the frequent use of the term intertextuality.

Based on intersecting but by no means synonymous worldviews, and comparably different emphases on the theory–method relationship in academic research (see
Chapter 3
), research programmes falling under the rubric of textual analysis treat visual, written, or aural content as latent – hidden levels of meaning-making – the significance of which requires active interpretation that is more than the sum total of frequency of appearance:

• How the researcher goes about interpreting (usually posited as the opposite of counting) the content can follow a number of trajectories, based in linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism.
  
• Non-quantified sorts of ‘content analysis’ – usually called
  textual analysis
  – are executed on the basis that manifest content – words – are in themselves codes. This means that their frequency or ‘preferred placement’ has a significance that may be more than face value.
  
• The emphasis therefore is on inductive reasoning – to conceptualize, ‘theorize your way out of ’ the material
  ⁷
  rather than impose a coding scheme onto it. In this sense qualitative content analysis, whether this is called discourse or textual analysis, is based on inductive modes of reasoning.
  
• For this reason the effectiveness of the eventual outcome of these sorts of analyses is dependent on the agility with which the researcher can make an argument by way of handling the material in a more pliable, and plastic way.
  

Research based on a treatment of the written, visual, and aural production of societies – from hieroglyphics to totem poles, Hollywood or Bollywood musicals, YouTube videos, to government White Papers – still require a researcher to select a ‘unit of analysis’, have a research question and object of analysis in mind and a theoretical framework by which to make sense of the material they are investigating. It is a caricature of well-conceived and well-executed research in these traditions, to assume that the influence of philosophical heavyweights, particularly those from continental Europe, means that there is no methodological rigour involved. On the contrary, the research question takes on a particularly central role, as does the ability of the researcher to make use of their ‘text’ in such a way that their argument and evidence hang together. These are not approaches where ‘anything goes’.
⁸

But the main issue for research students brought up and skilful with the audio-visual media and advertising images that surround them all the time –indeed permeate all our working and everyday lives in hi-tech and visually saturated societies – is that being used to something is not the same as being able to analyse it, or treat it in academic research terms.

The following practicalities may appear straightforward, but as educators and supervisors know, ‘seeing’ an image or ‘hearing’ a piece of music is distinct from analysing it. Observation in these sorts of research are based on how the object observed is conceived as something in particular, be it a fossil, an advertising image, or a film scene. How we hear or see something as aural or visual and how we might analyse it requires different levels of engagement. So:

1. What exactly is your
   text
   ?
   
   • Is it a single item? A cluster of similar items? A selection of contrasting items?
     
   • If it is an image, is it a still or moving one? (Photograph or movie still, video or film-clip).
     
   • If it is a piece of audio, how would you characterize it? A musical composition? An environmental sound? A soundtrack? A sample? Pop song, live or recorded?
     
2. Once selected, or perhaps on the basis of why you think it is relevant to your inquiry, consider the following:
   
   • What do you see initially? In other words, how would you describe it if the image (or clip, audio sample) were not available? For example, how is it organized as colour, form, depth? How long is it? Is there a clear subject (for example, a face, or ‘story’) or is it more abstract?
     
   • What is your initial, or recurring response to the text (image, sound, clip)?
     
   • Do you think this is the only response possible, i.e. would other people respond in the same way?
     
   • Is this response a negative or positive one? How do you think this affects your eventual understanding of what its significance is? For instance, is the image a controversial one (for example, using nudity, or violent references, or reproducing documentary footage of violence or disaster such as starving children).
     
   • Does the context (of your reception or its production) affect your or others’ reactions? For example, if this is an advertisement, is it part of a larger campaign? Does it include references to social issues or current events? If so, in what way?
     
3. The next step is to consider the exact approach you are going to take in analytical terms, assuming here that you have not already opted for a particular school, for example,
   critical discourse analysis
   (see Fairclough 2003). This includes addressing questions such as:
   
   • Are you interested primarily in analysing the text on its own terms, as an aesthetic or cultural artefact?
     
   • Have you a clear idea about whether you are interested in the text’s socio-cultural, political, or economic significance?
     
   • Or are you more concerned with the way it was produced or the context in which it has been circulated and how others makes sense of it?
     
     • For example, television newscasts are studied from the point of view of how they are produced (edited, written, timed) as well as how they convey meanings (the item itself), along with how audiences respond (differently) to these programmes.
       
     • For example, an advertising campaign is one thing, an analysis of the particular images and how they convey various meanings (for example about femininity, aspiration, love and desire) another. Global brands and the advertising industry have been particularly influential in creating particular sorts of images that not only sell something but sell this commodity a certain way (for example, cars with beautiful women, clothes with androgynous models, cigarettes as socially desirable, alcohol as cool).
       
   • Have you an idea about what sort of worldview is at stake in the approach you will be employing? In other words, as a baseline are you taking a
     
     • hermeneutic
       approach to its meaning?
       
     • psychoanalytical
       one?
       
     • semiotic
       one?
       
     • structuralist
       or
       post-structuralist
       one?
       
     • post-colonial
       or
       feminist
       approach to any of the above?
       
4. Moving ahead: How are you going to present your ‘findings’ and substantiating evidence; on what – and whose – authority?
   
   • First, is pasting in an image or frame-by-frame stills of a film scene enough on its own? Will you need to dissect these in some way? If so, what kind of commentary is required for this evidence to ground your analysis in some sort of argument?
     
   • If reproducing an image, have you considered copyright issues?
     
   • How do you envisage lining up your analysis to that of others? What kind of larger discussion (viz. literature) is pertinent to your interpretation?
     
   • Had you considered that there could be a danger of reading too much into an image, a text? In other words, on what authority are you drawing your inferences?
     
   • Do you impute all possible interpretations to this text, or its relationship to the world, the historical context in which it circulates or is consumed?
     

As you can see from the list above, these terms of reference refer to a large body of literature, and their composite debates, in turn. They also point to a range of world-views, some of which consist of trenchant alternatives to conventional approaches to studying cultural and social production.

By the same token, these approaches have become in other quarters an orthodoxy as well, begging a number of questions about the privileged interpretative position maintained by these authoritative analyses; ‘ways of seeing’ (see Berger 1990) may indeed be multiple, any one boiling down to many other factors. Emerging in the crucible of the postmodern or, as some call it, ‘literary turn’ of the last quarter of the twentieth century, these larger debates are beyond our scope. Their echoes and ramifications for how generations of research students approach any given text, however defined, are palpable in books, classrooms, and dissertation work.

As research students live and study in an image-saturated world, much of which now comes in the form of web-based multimedia, here too we can see longstanding traditions of research under pressure to take account of the different qualities web-mediated, produced and circulated content bring to research endeavours. Add to this the instantaneity and global circulation of images – advertising, news, entertainment – and we see how research incorporating texts (however defined) as an object of analysis is having to deal with new challenges. As Judith Williamson notes in her then groundbreaking structuralist analysis,
Decoding Advertising
:

As noted above, western academic research is heavily dependent on the written word even though nowadays this is arguably being superseded by visual and audio cultures.

A final note on this generically qualitative approach to researching content as coded, social texts. The distinctions between all the aforementioned philosophical approaches to how people create and represent their world, in figurative and literal
terms (documentary evidence) that include commerce, beliefs, and everyday experiences and those that treat content in more quantifiable ways, runs along another dividing line.

To put the distinction rather starkly, this is an
ontological
difference between whether

• the physical world and its representation (in visual or linguistic form) operate in a one-to-one relationship, or
  
• as the Surrealist and Dadaist movements in early twentieth-century art, and others in psychology, evoked and provoked their viewers to consider, there is a gap not only in our ability to accurately convey what we see (for example, a landscape painting in the realist style) but also in the way the physical, and by association social world is made up of contradictory ‘ways of seeing’ that include emotions, drives, or cultural sensibilities.
  

We can see then that the first option above could also apply to quantitative, researcher and coding-scheme driven forms of inquiry even though these treat texts as manifest (not coded) content, strictly speaking. In the second option we can see how in some research scenarios a written or visual ‘text’ could well be interpreted on its own terms as well as examined in light of what others have to say, for example, by way of surveys, interviews, or focus groups.

If you come down on the second of these options then the next,
epistemological
challenge (particularly if you are ever debating these points with practitioners of the first option) comprises questions about the status and nature of the knowledge produced:

• Which ways are best to interpret gaps, contradictions, double meanings?
  
• Is only one interpretation possible? Then whose counts?
  
• And even if this were so, are meanings conveyed and received at the individual level; or
  
• Are they rather the product of cultural – social – agreement; tacit or institutionalized?
  
• When did these start, or develop over time? In short where to draw the line if everything is socially embedded, all texts multiple, all interpretations valid?
  

If your research inquiry, and the question you are addressing, leads you to consider more than one of these options then there is no reason for you not to design the data-gathering and analysis accordingly. Here, as always, it is less a question of piling one approach on top of another but rather showing how exactly a considered application of elements of both would be informative. That, again (and it bears repeating) is where the methodological rationale has an abstract and a practical side.