Content analysis as a research method

Content analysis is a research method used to measure the number of times a behaviour or event occurs within one or several forms of media.

Conducting content analysis:-
Researchers who wanted to see how much aggression occured on television would use content analysis as a research method. They would have to take a number of steps to do this:

1) Decide what aggressive behaviour is.
2) Develop a list of behaviours or categories that could be measured as aggressive.
3) Decide on a sample they need to study (e.g. which television programmes or adverts, what times of day).
4) Tally (count) the times aggression occured.
5) Assess the reliability of their results.

Tallying:- (a single mark on a chart to show that a behaviour/cateory has been found during content analysis).
Once they have selected a sample of programmes to watch, the researcher uses a tally to record how many times they witnessed the aggressive acts on their lists. At the end, the tallies are added up to give the total number of aggressive acts so that they can decide how much aggression is on television.

The…