DOCUMENTS - Content Analysis/Semiology

DOCUMENTS - Content Analysis/Semiology

1. For a researcher to take meaning from a document, they first need to decide how to do so.

   • Semiology is the study of signs and symbols, and their use in interpretation.
     • Semiology is a more qualitative way of interpreting data found in a document.
       • Favoured by Interpretivists.
       • The meanings behind pictures, features, and other qualitative information is studied.
         • Positivists (and other critics) argue that his is an unreliable and not very valid way of studying a document as the researcher's own ideas may be transferred to the interpretation.
   • Content analysis is a systematic way of dealing with the content of a document. A researcher can take some qualitative information, and turn it into some quantitative data.
     • Favoured by Positivists.
   • Positivists and Interpretivists all have their own unique view of what is the best way to research, so they both favour different ways of interpreting documents.

2. Gill's Description of how content analysis works, with the example of how female characters in the media are portrayed in the media.

   • 1. Decide what categories the researchers are going to focus on, use and record: e.g. employee, full-time housewife, etc.
     • 2. Study the source (this could be a tv show or a magazine article, for example) and put the characters that are in it into the categories which have been decided.
       • This could be followed up with research using official statistics to see if what was found in that piece of media is representative, biased etc., and what that may mean.

3. Content analysis/semiology is most used when interpreting the media - for example, content analysis could be used to record how much importance is given to different issues by recording how much space different articles are given in a newspaper or television news reports.

4. Examples

   • Lobban: used content analysis to analyse the presence of gender roles in children's reading schemes.
   • Tuchman: Television's portrayal of women
     • (Both of these studies revealed that women's roles were stereotyped and limited.)

5. Advantages/ Disadvantages

   • Content analysis is cheap.
   • Some documents can be very easy and not very time consuming to access, compared to doing an involved study.
   • Positivists favour the quantitative nature of content analysis.
     • BUT interpretivists argue that simply counting up the number of times something happens is not very valid and doesn't tell us anything about what it MEANS.