Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

NONREACTIVE RESEARCH AND SECONDARY ANALYSIS

KEY TERMS

accretion measure
coding system
erosion measure
fallacy of misplaced
concreteness

intercoder reliability

latent coding

manifest coding

nonreactive research

social indicator

structured observation

text

unobtrusive measures

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.For what types of research questions is content analysis appropriate?

2.What are the four characteristics of content that are observed and recorded in cod-

ing systems?

3.Of what reliability problems should the researcher using existing statistical data

be aware?

4.What are the advantages and disadvantages of secondary data analysis?

5.Why do content analysis researchers use multiple coders, and what is a possible

problem with doing this?

6.How are inferences limited in content analysis?

7.What units of analysis are used in content analysis?

8.What is the aggregation problem in existing statistics?

9.What are the three validity problems in content analysis?

10.Of what limitations of using existing statistics should researchers be aware?

NOTES

1. See Webb and colleagues (1981:7–11).


2. For an inventory of nonreactive measures, see
   Bouchard (1976) and Webb et al. (1981).


3. See Krippendorff (1980:13). For definitions of con-
   tent analysis, see Holsti (1968a:597), Krippendorff
   (1980:21–24), Markoff et al. (1974:5–6), Stone and
   Weber (1992), and Weber (1985:81, note 1).


4. Weitzman et al. (1972) is a classic in this type of
   research.


5. See Ariés (1977) for an example.


6. Examples of content analysis studies can be found in
   Berelson (1952), Carney (1972), McDiarmid (1971),

Myers and Margavio (1983), Namenwirth (1970), Sep-

strup (1981), Stewart (1984), and Stone et al. (1966).

Harwood (2000) described elderly people on television.

Also see Weber (1983) for a discussion of measurement

issues in content analysis.

7. Stone and Weber (1992) and Weber (1984, 1985)
   review computerized content analysis techniques.


8. See Andren (1981:58–66) and Holsti (1969:94–126)
   on reliability and latent or semantic analysis.


9. See Krippendorff (1980) for various measures of in-
   tercoder reliability. Also see Fiske (1982) for the related
   issue of convergent validity.