Bibliography for Content analysis

Bibliography for Content analysis

(Neuendorf, 2002)

Definition: Content analysis is a summarizing, quantitative analysis of messages that relies in the scientific method (including attention to objectivity-intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalizability, replicability, and hypothesis testing), and is not limited to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented. (Neuendorf, 2002, p. 10); Weber defines it as a method that uses a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text (Neuendorf, 2002, p. 10).

A variety of media form and content types have been examined for their gender roles. Generally, the findings confirm a message of environment of androcentrism (with males heavily overrepresented in sheer numbers and routinely given more important roles) and sex stereotyping (with significant and often predictable differences between male and female characterizations) qtd in Neuendorf, 2002, p. 202. (Important note: no research has investigated literary texts used in secondary schools and in GCSEs).

(Hesse- Biber & Leavy, 2007)

(Leavy, 2007)

“By discovering patterns between existing and missing document, and with power/gender relations in the society of the time, and by bringing this material to the attention of people today, new ties are made that help explain current relation between gender and power and give some groups a greater sense of their own history.” Shulamit Reinharz, 1992, p. 163 qtd in Leavy, 2007, p. 223. “Feminist intervention in popular culture might offer feminist politocs a pragmatic strategy to shift the balance of power and prepare the ground for [pedagogic and cultural] change, and thus transform society.” Suheyla Kirca, 1999, p. 105 qtd in Leavy, 2007, p. 223.

Since mainstream secondary schools offer the culture’s dominant definitions of men and women, it is therefore crucial to intervene in the mainstream schooling to make feminist meanings a part of everyday common sense and practices. “Culture is a site where struggles over meaning are played out and later embedded into a host of cultural artifacts such as texts. Particular cultural struggles over meaning might result in a collective or national memory of an event or time, or, the result might be broader such as a set of ideas about a group. The repository of artifacts containing these visions and ideas may also contain implicit or explicit contradictions. By investigating culture in general, and literary texts in particular, dominant narratives, images, ideas and stereotyped representations can be exposed and challenged.” (Leavy, 2007, p. 224).

The  aim of the research is to critically interrogate the literary texts that comprise GCSE materials to “resist patriarchal understandings of social reality that push women to the peripheries of their culture and social interpretive processes”. “By bringing a feminist lens and feminist concerns such as women’s status, equality, and social justice to the study of material culture (products) and symbolic culture (multimedium images and representations), feminist researchers employ content analysis in a unique way and ask questions that would otherwise go unexplored. Culture, as a site where ideas are created, disseminated, and consumed, feminists become an intergral component in unraveling texts and expose how women and men are viewed.” (Leavy, 2007, p. 224)

The broadest finding is that the “gendered point of view” shows an “overwhelming preference of men’s perceptives”. This is a significant finding as we try to make sense of whose perspectives are highlighted and whose perspectives, voices, and visions of the world are silenced or marginalized in literary texts used by examination boards for GCSEs.

“The nature of the data garners them two unique qualities: a) the data are pre-existing and thus naturalistic, and 2) the data are noninteractive; qualities which the data a built- in level of authenticity” (Hesse- Biber & Leavy, 2007, p. 227). Qualitative content analysis can help feminist scholars interpret a document as a whole or in parts; under this qualitative feminist approach researchers would use words directly from the text under investigation to form their code categories. This kind of approach produces a thematic analysis with rich, descriptive data that can be used to generate theory. “Feminist researchers perform textual analysis from a deconstruction perspective in which a text is analysed to see not only what is there, but also what is missing, silenced, or absent. The goal is to deconstruct the text to see what is revealed, what emerges, what juxtapositions develop.” (Leavy, 2007, p. 228).

“We can learn about our society by interrogating the material items produced within the culture. In other words, we can learn about social life, such as norms, values, socialization, or social stratification, by looking at texts we produce, which reflect macrosocial processes and our worldview. Furthermore, cultural artifacts do not simply reflect social norms and values; texts are central to how norms and values come to be shaped” (Reinharz, 1992, p. 151 qtd in Leavy, 2007, p. 229). “The texts that groups of people produce are embedded with larger ideas those groups have, whether shared or contested, such as ideas about sex and gender” (Leavy, 2007, p. 229). “This distinguishes content analysis from interviews  which relies on subjective individuals, who have been “imprinted” by societal norms and values, as the primary starting point for knowledge building” (Leavy, 2007, p. 229). Since texts are produced within a vaccum but are the products of a given time and space with all that entails from technlogies of production and reproduction, to differential access to those technologies, to the cultural norms and values that guide all aspects of social life. For example in a patriarchal society texts produced in dominant venues are likely to contain traces of gendered ideas about social reality” (Leavy, 2007). “Cultural artifacts are the products of individual activity, social organization, technology, and cultural patterns” (Reinharz, 1992, p. 147 qtd in Leavy, 2007, p. 230). “Just as texts can be an integral part in creating and maintaining the status quo, so too can they help challenge long- held beliefs and practices. Texts can be sources of resistance, including feminist resistance, which may also be a part of a feminist textual analysis project. In this vein, some researchers employ deconstruction from a feminist point of view. Irigaray (1985), for example, posits deconstruction as a method of “jaming the theoretical machinery” by exposing what is absent within a representation, what is taken-for-granted, and what is centrally located versus what is forced to the perpheries (Leavy, 2007, p. 230).

‘Content analysis requires a sampling of data, which are then broken into “units of analysis” (such as lines of text). The data are then coded, which means they are categorized into preconceived or inductively generated code categories, which may be very literal/ specific or larger metacodes that are more conceptual in nature. (Leavy, 2007, p. 231)

The methodology is derived from feminist critical theory and it is mainly qualitative in nature and includes semi-structured interviews. I also apply content analysis to the literary texts and the interviews. The reason for doing content analysis is first to find out which themes/topic appear and how often they are repeated in the texts. Second, is to discover how these themes/ topics work as a signifying system and a bearer of of a certain ideology, and how this ideology deals with the construction of contemporary gender stereotypes. This methodology allows us to examine the various ways in which feminist values and broader issues about gender biased messages are articulated, and debated by teachers that are incorporated in cultural, literary products into the national curriculum of English Literature. While content analysis is an accepted method in the field of social sceinces, there are no fixxed rules which determine its framework. The qualitative approach permits an investigation of deeper levels of meaning and is concerned with more with content as a mediator or reflector of hidden cultural phenomena. This qualitative approach permits a nore complex analysis of themes on a subtextual level. Analysis of any cultural product cannot be isolated from the wider context of onwership and especially for English Literature curriculum, since the onwers/ authors cannot be interviewed, the teachers who teach literature are interviewed to provide their account of their own accounts of gender stereotypes and gender biased messages found in the literature curriculum. The information gathered from the interviews is used in addition to the textual analysis of the literary texts used for GCSEs to examine to what extext teachers perceive a gender bias in the curriculum, and whether their accounts overlap with the actual content of the texts themselves, and furthermore, how influential the role of a teacher is in shaping the content of the texts and (and to explore their resistive capabilities) what their characteristics and strategies might signify for the future of female and male representations from the viewpoint of feminist politics. (Leavy, 2007, pp. 237-238).

In addition to exploring the dominant representations of gender that flow from a patriarchal social structure and worldview, it is useful to employ content analysis to study