Page 275 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes For example, if you were studying physical violence on TV drama programs, you’d focus on each
violent action and record information about it. This is content interviewing: interviewing a unit of
content as if it were a person, asking it “questions,” and recording the “answers” you find in the
content unit.
What you can’t do, of course, when interviewing the content is to probe the response to enable the
coding to be more accurate. A real interview respondent, when asked “Why did you say that?” will
answer - but media content can’t do that.
When you’re interviewing content, it’s good practice to create a short questionnaire, and fill in a
copy for each content unit. This helps avoid errors and inconsistencies in coding. The time you save
in the end will compensate for the extra paper used. The questionnaires are processed with standard
survey software.
The main disadvantage of content interviewing is that you can’t easily check a code by looking at
the content that produced it. This helps greatly in increasing the accuracy and consistency of the
analysis. But when there’s no transcript (as is usual when interviewing content) you can check a
code only by finding the recording of that unit, and playing it back. In the olden days (the 20th
century) content analysts had a lot of cassette tapes to manage.
It was important to number them, note the counter positions, make an index of tapes, and store
them in order. Now, in the 21st century, computers are faster, and will store a lot more data. I
suggest storing sound and video recordings for content analysis on hard disk or CD-ROM, with
each content unit as a separate file. You can then flick back and forth between the coding software
and the playback software. This is a great time-saver.

Overlapping codes
When the content you are analysing has large units of text—e.g., a long interview, this can be difficult
to code. A common problem is that codes overlap. The interviewee may be talking about a particular
issue (given a particular code) for several minutes. In the middle of that, there may be a reference to
something else, which should be given a different kind of code. The more abstract your coding
categories, the more likely you are to encounter this problem. If it’s important to capture and analyse
these overlapping codes, there are two solutions:

High-tech:

Use software specially designed for this purpose, such as Nud*ist or Atlas TI. Both are powerful,
but not cheap – and it takes months to learn to use them well.

Low-tech:
Cutting up transcripts and sorting the pieces of paper – as explained above. Disadvantages: if
interrupted, you easily lose track of where you’re up to – and never do this in a windy place!
Unless you’re really dedicated, avoid this type of content analysis. Such work is done mainly by
academics (because they have the time) but not by commercial researchers, because the usefulness
of the results seldom justifies the expense.

Content analysis without coding
Coding is another form of summarizing. If you want to summarize some media content (the usual
reason for doing content analysis) one option is to summarize the content at a late stage, instead of
the usual method of summarizing it at an early stage.
If your content units are very small (such as individual words) there’s software that can count
words or phrases. In this case, no coding is needed, and the software does the counting for you, but
you still need to summarize the results. This means a lot less work near the beginning of the project,
and a little more at the end. If you don’t do coding, there’s much less work.

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