Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 511
characteristics, and personality info (not including sexual or emotional characteristics).
Hirschman formulated and tested specific hypotheses about which
resources men and women would offer and seek in personal ads. She selected
20 test ads at random from the New York Magazine and The Washingtonian
and checked that the 10 kinds of resources were, in fact, observable in the ads.
Sexual traits and services were less than 1% of all resources coded. This was
1983–1984, but even then, ads with explicit references to sexual traits and
services were more common in other periodicals than in The Washingtonian
and New York Magazine.
Hirschman next gave 10 men and 11 women the list of resource categories
and a list of 100 actual resources (‘‘young,’’ ‘‘attractive,’’ ‘‘fun loving,’’
‘‘divorced,’’ ‘‘32-year-old,’’ etc.) gleaned from the 20 test ads. She asked the
21 respondents to match the 100 resources with the resource category that
seemed most appropriate. This exercise demonstrated that the resource items
were exhaustive and mutually exclusive: No resource items were left over,
and all of them could be categorized into only one of the 10 resource categories.
When she was confident her codebook worked, Hirschman tested her
hypotheses. She sampled approximately 100 female-placed ads and 100 maleplaced
ads from each magazine—a total of 400 ads. A male and a female
coder, working independently (and unaware of the hypotheses of the study),
coded 3,782 resource items taken from the 400 ads as belonging to one of the
10 resource categories. The coding took 3 weeks. This is not easy work.
Hirschman was concerned with intercoder reliability—that is, making
sure that coders saw the same thing when they coded those ads. She gave the
data to a third coder who identified discrepancies between the first two coders.
Of 3,782 resource items coded, there were discrepancies (theme contrasts) on
636 (16.8%), and one of the coders failed to code 480 items (12.7%). Hirschman
resolved the theme contrasts herself. She checked the omissions against
the ads to see if the coder who had made an assignment had done so because
the resource was, in fact, in the ad. This was always the case, so the 480
resource items omitted by one coder were counted as if they had been assigned
to the ad by both coders.
The results? Men were more likely than women to offer monetary
resources; women were more likely than men to seek monetary resources.
Women were more likely than men to offer physical attractiveness. Washington,
D.C., and New York City are supposed to be hip places, yet the way men
and women wrote their own personal ads in 1983–1984 conformed utterly to
traditional gender role expectations. Other studies since then show that, while
there are some differences across social and economic classes, what hetero-