Energia's Research Adventures by Jacques L. Koko Ph.D

Author:Jacques L. Koko Ph.D. [Jacques L. Koko, Ph.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798765227800
Publisher: Balboa Press
Published: 2022-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Energia’s Data Analysis

Methods and Results

Upon their return to Energium, Chercheur would advise Energia to perform a content analysis on the newspapers of the kingdom to make sense of the main debate topics across the nation. This would help both him and her update themselves, after a long absence from Energium.

“What is a content analysis?” she asked him.

“You conduct a content analysis,” he said, “whenever you study the content of any recorded communication. It could be the content of a photo album, a stamp album, a sticker album, an autograph album, a musical album, a song, a painting, a book, a journal, a magazine, a newspaper, a website, a letter, a text message, or an email.”

“How do I perform the content analysis of newspapers in the case of my research?” she asked, both responsively and adumbratively.

“Listen, and make a mental note of it!” he exclaimed oratorically. “First, you come up with a research hypothesis, a general opinion or statement you would like to test. Once you have a hypothesis, you need to identify the dependent variable in the hypothesis and create at least two categories to operationalize or measure the dependent variable. Coding your categories numerically will help the analysis tremendously. After you have identified the groups in your dependent variable, you need to identify the unit of analysis, which is the small subset you focus on for data collection. In this case, your unit of analysis is article, I mean the articles in the newspapers. Next, you choose a time period, and you randomly select a newspaper to start reading its articles. For example, if your hypothesis is that the articles from newspapers in Energium echo the debate on renewable energy, as you read each article, you identify whether it is about renewable energy or not. If, for instance, you get more than fifty percent of the articles reflecting the topic of renewable energy, then you will conclude that renewable energy represents the main topic being debated in the kingdom, which would support your research hypothesis and reject the null hypothesis.”

To heed her mentor’s advice, Energia set to discover the trends in social debates in the Kingdom of Energium through a content analysis. She would randomly select a sample of one hundred local newspapers and monitor them to uncover local trends of publications. She started the process of the content analysis by conceptualizing two broad categories to classify the topics covered in the newspapers. Her first category was on the newspapers with at least one article on the benefits of renewable energy sources. She coded that group numerically as one (1). The second category was on the newspapers without any allusion to renewable energy, which she coded as zero (0). As she leafed through the newspapers, she found that seventy-five out of the one hundred newspapers had at least one article on the benefits of promoting renewable energies.

Encouraged by those findings, she decided to take a step further in the content analysis. She randomly selected ten of the one hundred newspapers and read all their articles.

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