Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

510 Chapter 17
There were 617 commercials: 275 from the United States, 204 from Mexico,
and 138 from Australia.
Because of her research question, Gilly used only adult men and women
who were on camera for at least 3 seconds or who had at least one line of
dialogue. There were 169 women and 132 men in the U.S. ads; 120 women
and 102 men in the Mexican ads; and 52 women and 49 men in the Australian
ads.
Text analysis—particularly nonquantitative analysis—is often based on purposive
sampling. Trost (1986) thought the relationship between teenagers and
their families might be affected by five different dichotomous variables. To
test this idea, he intentionally selected five cases from each of the 32 possible
combinations of the five variables and conducted 160 interviews.
Nonquantitative studies in content analysis may also be based on extreme
or deviant cases, cases that illustrate maximum variety on variables, cases that
are somehow typical of a phenomenon, or cases that confirm or disconfirm a
hypothesis. Even a single case may be enough to display something of substantive
importance, but Morse (1994) suggests using at least six participants
in studies where you’re trying to understand the essence of experience and
carrying out 30–50 interviews for ethnographies and grounded theory studies.
Once a sample of texts is established, the next step is to identify the basic,
nonoverlapping units of analysis. This is called unitizing (Krippendorf 1980)
or segmenting (Tesch 1990). The units may be entire texts (books, interviews,
responses to an open-ended question on a survey) or segments (words, wordsenses,
sentences, themes, paragraphs). If you want to compare across
texts—to see whether or not certain themes occur—the whole text (representing
a respondent or an organization) is the appropriate unit of analysis.
When the idea is to compare the number of times a theme occurs across a
set of texts, then you need to break the text down into smaller chunks—what
Kortendick (1996) calls context units—each of which reflects a theme.
Coding in Content Analysis
With a set of texts in hand, the next steps are to develop a codebook and
actually code the text. Up to this point, this is what’s done in grounded-theory
analysis. Consider Elizabeth Hirschman’s work (1987) on how people sell
themselves to one another in personal ads. From her reading of the literature
on resource theory, Hirschman thought that she would find 10 kinds of
resources in personal ads: love, physical characteristics, educational status,
intellectual status, occupational status, entertainment services (nonsexual),
money status, demographic information (age, marital status, residence), ethnic