Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 83

Another type of secondary analysis, called content analysis, relies on the systematic and objective analysis of the content of cultural artifacts in print, visual, audio, and digital media, including photographs, movies, advertisements, speeches, and newspaper articles (Wolff 2007). The goal is to use qualitative and especially quantitative methods to understand the content of messages. In one well-known study, Herbert Gans (1979) did a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of news on television and in newsmagazines to identify patterns in the reporting of news. For example, he found that well-known people were dealt with much more frequently than were unknowns. Among non-war-related stories, government conflicts and disagreements were more likely to be dealt with than were government decisions.

Gans’s content analysis took as its focus the overt content of the news, but it is also possible to use content analysis to analyze other issues, such as gender inequality. For example, researchers performed a content analysis of 1,245 characters on 89 prime-time television programs, finding that though some gender stereotypes have declined, others, such as dominant men and sexually provocative women, persist (Sink and Mastro 2016). Content analysis is moving beyond traditional media and is now also being conducted on social media. For example, Pilkington and Rominov (2017) researched fathers’ worries during their partners’ pregnancies by analyzing the content of their posts on Reddit. They found that most fathers-to-be are worried about infant well-being and the potential for prenatal loss.