Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 507
start—usually, but not always, quantitatively. This requires (1) starting with a
theory that you want to test; (2) creating a set of codes for variables in the
theory; (3) applying those codes systematically to a set of texts; (4) testing the
reliability of coders when more than one applies the codes to a set of texts;
(5) creating a unit-of-analysis-by-variable matrix from the texts and codes;
and (6) analyzing that matrix statistically with methods like those laid out in
chapters 19, 20, and 21.
Content analysis doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. When the
Nazis came to power in the 1930s, the U.S. Government Communications
Commission began monitoring shortwave radio broadcasts from Germany.
Analysts established 14 major propaganda themes in the Nazi media. In 1942,
the U.S. Department of Justice accused William Dudley Pelley of sedition,
claiming that Pelley was publishing pro-Nazi propaganda while the United
States was at war with Germany.
The government asked independent coders to classify 1,240 items in Pelley’s
publications as belonging or not belonging to one of those 14 Nazi propaganda
themes. Harold Lasswell, a political scientist and expert in propaganda
analysis, testified that 1,195 of the items (96.4%) ‘‘were consistent with
and suggested copying from the German propaganda themes’’ (United States
v. Pelley 1942). Pelley was convicted. The conviction was upheld by the U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals, and the admissibility in court of evidence based on
this simple method of content analysis was established (Goldsen 1947).
Maxine Margolis (1984) did ethnohistorical research on the changing
images of women in the United States. She used the Ladies Home Journal,
from 1889 to 1980, as an archival database, and asked a simple question: Do
ads in the Ladies Home Journal for household products show homemakers or
servants using those products?
From historical data, Margolis knew that the large pool of cheap servant
labor in U.S. cities—labor that had been driven there by the Industrial Revolution—was
in decline by about 1900. The readers of the Ladies Home Journal
in those days were middle-class women who were accustomed to employing
household servants. Margolis’s counts showed clearly the transformation of
the middle-class homemaker from an employer of servants to a direct user of
household products.
Margolis took a random sample of her database (2 years per decade of the
magazine, and 2 months per year, for a total of 36 magazines), but she did not
have to devise a complex tagging scheme. She simply looked for the presence
or absence of a single, major message. It is very unlikely that Margolis could
have made a mistake in coding the ads she examined. Servants are either portrayed
in the ad, or they aren’t. So, by defining a nominal variable, and one
that is easily recognized, Margolis was able to do a content analysis that added