Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 509
Content analysis is easily applied to film, Cowan and O’Brien (1990)
wanted to know, for example, whether men or women in slasher films were
more likely to be survivors, and what other personal characteristics accounted
for those who got axed and those who lived. The corpus of text in this case
was 56 slasher movies.
These movies contained a total of 474 victims, who were coded for gender
and survival. Conventional wisdom about slasher films, of course, holds that
victims are mostly women and slashers are mostly men. Although slashers in
these films were, in fact, mostly men, it turned out that victims were equally
likely to be women or men. Surviving as a female slasher victim, however,
was strongly associated with the absence of sexual behavior and with being
less physically attractive than nonsurviving women. The male nonsurvivors
were cynical, egotistical, and dictatorial. Cowan and O’Brien conclude that,
in slasher films, sexually pure women survive and that ‘‘unmitigated masculinity’’
ends in death (ibid.:195).
The methodological issues associated with content analysis are all evident
here. Does the sample of 56 films used by Cowan and O’Brien justify generalizing
to slasher films in general? Did the coders who worked on the project
make correct judgments in deciding things like the physical attractiveness of
female victims or the personality and behavioral characteristics of the male
victims? These two issues in particular, sampling and coding, are at the heart
of content analysis. (For content analysis of young adults’ reactions to slasher
films, see Nolan and Ryan 2000.)
Sampling in Content Analysis
There are two components to sampling in content analysis. The first is identifying
the corpus of texts; the second is identifying the units of analysis
within the texts. If you collect 40 or 50 life histories, then you naturally analyze
the whole corpus. But when the units of data run into the hundreds or
even thousands—like all television commercials that ran during prime time in
August 2005; all front-page stories of the New York Times from 1851 to 2005;
all campaign speeches by John Kerry and George W. Bush during the 2004
presidential campaign—then a representative sample of records must be made.
Gilly (1988) did a cross-cultural study of gender roles in advertising. She
videotaped a sample of 12 hours of programming in Los Angeles (United
States), Monterrey (Mexico), and Brisbane (Australia), from 8 a.m. to4p.m.
on Tuesday and from 7 p.m. to11p.m. on Wednesday. To control for seasonal
variation between the hemispheres, the U.S. and Mexico samples were taken
in September 1984, and the Australia sample was taken in February 1985.