What Are the Drawbacks of Using a Content Analysis

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The Answer is Among the drawbacks of content analysis are the time involved and the need to avoid mistakes when analyzing a large collection of written records. Suppose, for example, you wanted to see how the use of political symbols had changed over the last fifty years. You might take a sample of presidential addresses or campaign speeches and simply count the number of occurrences of certain phrases, such as "it is not the role [job, responsibility, etc.] of government to." You might then calculate and plot the proportion of such ideas over time. Doing so, though, requires that you-or, preferably, a coder or coders-read the material, look for phrases that meet the selection criteria, and make tallies. This is a time-consuming process; if a coder becomes fatigued, he or she might overlook instances that should be recorded or count phrases twice, or make other mistakes.

What Are the Drawbacks of Using a Content Analysis

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