Van-Anh La Honors 232 1022656 Midterm Exam 1. Design and Process a.

What are the phases of a typical content analysis, and what key activities occur in each phase? 1. Conceptualization and Purpose: Identify problem An example of a problem would be: underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the newspaper. Although at this stage in the content audit process we may not know if this is even a problem, it is an issue we are concerned with and that we want to find a definite answer to through the audit. Review Theory and Research-Similar to our two briefing papers earlier in the quarter, after identifying the issue we are concerned with researchers often read about similar studies to look up how other people set up their audits, what types of research questions they asked, what variables they used. It is background research to help us know what we should expect and give us an idea of how to approach the design and analysis phases. Pose Specific research questions and hypotheses: We must propose a specific set of research questions that we are going to attempt to answer through our audit. An example of one that relates to the previous problem would be: How often are Asian Americans the primary subject of an article?. Research hypotheses are explicit statements predicting that a state or level of one variable is associated with the state of another variable. Example : The average number of Asian Americans as primary subjects of an article within a year of published newspapers will be disproportionate to the current Asian American population in the surrounding area. 2. Design: Define relevant content: What we are going to code, and what we will ignore. In our audit: only articles written by the Times staff, containing 3 or more paragraphs or standalone photos with a headline and caption. Specify Formal Design: Setting a limit on the number of variables in the overall audit, who will code what and how much, what defines our sample and sample frame, how will we measure the variables etc. Create Dummy Tables: Set up a sample coding grid that incorporates the variables you are coding for

Coding Protocols: Specific coding instructions for our variables, like the definitions we all had to turn in. Code 1 for female if the first name ends in ie, ia, or ey. Specify population and sampling plans: example- population is all the Seattle Times news articles in 2010 and our plan is to code at least one newspaper from each day of the week and all articles within the number of newspapers that we choose Pretest and establish reliability: Like we did in class, have a group of people code a small set of articles with the current coding instructions to determine what needs editing and how reliable the results we are getting are 3. Analysis: Process data: Start coding with a formal code guide and enter info into an excel spreadsheet Apply Statistical procedure: Run the coding through SPSS to calculate frequencies Interpret and report results: Draw conclusions from the data and write up a report explaining the findings and what they mean.

b.Tell me one question that your group is seeking to answer in the content audit and whether its an example of description or inference. How often are racially marked individuals categorized as perpetrators of a crime? This is an example of inference. Why? Because inferring is to infer from the communications its contest of productions or consumption. To compare what was observed to what wasnt observed and ask why. From this question we may find that 80% of the time someone is racially marked it is also when they are described as a perpetrator of a crime. Then to infer the consequences of such exposure we could say that because of this finding most Americans in the region would say this particular ethnic minority is responsible for a majority of the crimes in that surrounding area. 2. Measurement issues a. i) What is the theoretically appropriate level of measurement for this variable? Nominal measurement: #s are assigned to categories of the content. ii) Does the operational definition reflect that theoretically appropriate level of measurement? If not, what is the level of measurement used in the operational definition? Yes the operational definition does reflect a nominal measurement with numbers 1-4 assigned to each category. iii) Are the coding categories exhaustive and mutually exclusive? If not what would need to be changed to make them meet these important measurement data? I believe the coding categories are exhaustive they specify every contextual situation for each age group that a coder could come across. They had specific examples of such contextual

situations and did not just say code 1 for 24 years or under on bases of age explicitly mentioned in CU. I think for the most part is mutually exclusive as well, the number ranges for the ages do not overlap and the specific contextual situations mentioned for each category do not overlap as well. It may be missing something such as college graduate or college graduate for which these situations are not mentioned in the operational definition and the coder would be confused about what number to assign it. b. What is the recording unit for the age of first source mentioned variable in our study? What is context unit for this variable? Our study also includes a variable that records whether an article or photo appeared in the top half of the newspaper page. What is the context unit for that variable? What is the sampling unit for our study? Recording unit for the age of first source mentioned: an article in the Seattle Times newspaper in 2010 Context unit: Section of the newspaper ie Sports, Business, NW Ticket Context unit for a photo or article in the top half of the newspaper: Section of the newspaper ie frontpage (A1, B1, C1) Sample unit for study: Since our population is all the Seattle Times Newspapers in 2010, our sample unit will be 24(I dont remember how many students are in class) whole newspapers from that population. 3. Sampling a. Violence in video games research question: How often are players rewarded for their acts of violence in the game? Hypothesis: Rewards will increase exponentially as the players perform greater acts of violence. b. Plan: My population is games that are violent in within the top 4 gaming companies. My sample unit will include 2 games from each gaming company equally 8 games total, this is probability sampling because I want to ensure each company gets an equal chance in the audit. Our sample unit will be one round in each of the games whether it be boxing, fighting or shooting. Variables will be type of reward, frequency of reward, frequency of violent acts. Last two nominally first one ordinally. We will code a total of 3 rounds per game (3*8=24 rounds) c. Sample error: If each type of games rounds are too significantly different in timing and point reward system then my sampling may have issues being random. 4. Reliability and Validity a.Scotts pi= %observed agree -%expected agree/ 1-% expected agree .81-.2/.8=.76 It is rather reliable with a coefficient greater than .5 the two coders agreed for a greater majority. There could be some improving but the intercoder reliability is relatively reliable in this situation. b.Yes we have a valid measure of type, to improve our reliability we may just need to add some specific examples of situations the coder my run into under each category.

c.Yes it could be an appropriate reliability coefficient for the age variable on the previous page. I say so because since we are coding nominally for the age variable for the first source, our data table would look similar to the ones of bill and marys. We have 4 age categories and each is assigned a number so we can calculate % observed from the table and % expected from the number of categories we have. 5. Data Analysis: a. i) Bivariate. variables: photo, race ii) Multivariate. Variable: photo placement, photo , race iii) Univariate. Variable: photo set iv) Univariate. Variable: source vocational v) Bivariate. Variables: source vocation, gender b. i) 3278 ii) Medium Large iv) Not really meaningful 2.53 what? I understand this is based on circulation and number of reporters and the value of 2.53 doesnt tell me where the newspapers were circulating, or out of the 12 newspapers what does 2.53 mean in terms of size, what is the grading scale is a larger number better. I just cant assign any value to this number because theres no scale or description to represent it. vi) The only variable that has anything missing is the number of reporters which may cause for some concern however the missing population only accounts for 3.5% of the total population which is below the 5% acceptance rate and can be negligible. I would assume missing reporters would be articles that listed no author or was bought from an outer source from which we do not need the data anyways. vii) Bivariate analysis. Variables: size based on circulation or copes sold, number of reporters associated with an article coded