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were changing in time. After the war, content
analysis achieved wide civilian currency in the
social sciences as an empirical method for studying
a wide range of mass cultural phenomena including
newspaper editorial practices, sociocultural
aspects of teenage romance magazines, television
drama themes, racial stereotyping in the media,
gender relations in comics and many other kinds of
mass communication.
Despite its initial acceptance as a new scientific
procedure, content analysis was in essence an
empirical development of rationalist, aesthetic
criticism. Anyone evaluating a book, painting or
musical work is implicitly engaged in content
analysis to the extent that the reader is attempting
to inventory the signs and their meaning within a
text, and arriving at inferences about the author in
terms of theme, style, intention, outlook, background
and aesthetic importance. Content analysis
took this basic aesthetic procedure and developed it
by, first, expanding its applications from high
culture texts �the traditional frame for aesthetic
criticism) to those of popular culture and mass
communication and, second, eliminating the unsystematic
and subjective tendencies of aesthetic
criticism by replacing them with analysis built on
explicit statement of a priori hypotheses to be
examined, rigorously defining the categories of
content for scrutiny in exploring the hypotheses,
and quantifying the results. The process has been
well-defined by de Sola Pool �1973: 36): `The
content analyst aims at a quantitative classification
of a given body of content, in terms of a system of
categories devised to yield data relevant to specific
hypotheses concerning that content.'
Following its early wartime utility, criticism of
content analysis as a means of understanding texts
came from two quarters. First, there were those
within the ranks of content analysis, notably
Gerbner, who argued that a text could not be fully
evaluated purely on its internal characteristics
without an understanding of the external sociopolitical
constraints within which messages were
produced and circulated. For Gerbner, industrial
and market relationships and other socia1 determinants
might result in processes of textual
selection, omission and juxtaposition which would
not be revealed simply by inventorying existing
categories of content. In tourism promotion, for
content analysis 107
example, a brochure's properties cannot be
simply revealed by analysing its verbal and pictorial
elements �see also promotion, place). A fuller
understanding requires awareness of external
constraints impinging upon the text, including
legal requirements, political and institutional forces
and industry practices �for example, the size format
of many brochures is dictated by the racking
policies of travel agents who will not display nonstandard
sizes and shapes).
The other critique came from structuralists
working in rationalist rather than empirical traditions,
who argued that quantitative inventorying of
the denotative elements of messages might be less
important than interpreting the mythic dimensions
of key connoted verbal and pictorial elements, even
when their numerical occurrence was small. For
example, in an advertisement for the Seychelles the
number of times that the destination name is
mentioned might be less important than exploring
the mythic dimensions of important, individual
phrases or images such as `island paradise'. Moreover,
structuralism was less concerned with the
aggregate inventorying of elements within a text
than their structural relationships and the codes of
difference set up within the text by the position and
juxtaposition of ideas. Even more radically, structuralists
suggested that a communication's most
interesting feature might be what it excludes rather
than includes, an insight caught by the French
writer Macheret's notion of the `significant silences'
of the text. This includes, for example, the failure
of much tourism promotion to represent the social
realities of the inhabitants of Third World countries
packaged as dream destinations for tourists. In
short, structuralists challenged the value of quantitative
inventories of manifest content and
advocated interpretative approaches which revealed
latent and systematically excluded meanings.
Today, social scientists are most likely to use a
combination of numerical counts and interpretative
analysis, as well as attempting to locate the
external forces and relationships constraining a
text's production to arrive at evaluations of its
overall effects and meanings. In tourism, content
analysis has to date been mostly used by anthropologists
and sociologists in studies of the
ideological aspects of promotion, particularly
brochures. Less commonly it has also been used