Theme 4, Blog Post 1: Quantitative research

My selected article is A study of content diversity in online citizen journalism and online newspaper articles by Serena Carpenter. It was published in 2010 in New Media & Society (Impact Factor of 3,110).

In her work, Carpenter uses quantitative content analysis (QCA) to study the diversity of topics and the use of hyperlinks and additional attributes, such as photos, videos and graphs, in online citizen journalism and newspaper articles in the United States. The corpus of the study consists of 962 online articles (480 newspaper and 482 citizen journalism articles) published by regional newspapers and citizen journalism websites for a period of 1 month.

QCA aims to “identify and count the occurrence of specified characteristics or dimensions of texts, and, through this, to be able to say something about the messages, images, representations of such texts and their wider social significance” (Hansen and Machin, 2013:85).

According to Hansen and Machin, it is “particularly well suited for revealing trends and patterns in […] large quantities of communication”. Such large quantities, I think, are important, when one is trying to provide a wide and somewhat detailed view of the diversity of online newspaper and citizen journalism coverage, as is the aim of my chosen article.  

The method is also “highly flexible and adaptable [and] easy to use” (Hansen and Machin, 2013:85). It is also preferable to qualitative methods, when one is personally involved in the topic they are researching, because it removes the possibility of one’s personal bias affecting the research results, whereas qualitative methods are based on one’s “[assessment of] the data through their own subjectivities” (Thody, 2006:143).    

QCA’s claim to objectivity, however, is a bit problematic, I think, because, as we established in Theme 1, there is no such thing as objective knowledge and objective perception. Moreover, it does not allow for in-depth analyses of media content. Or, as Hansen and Machin put it, QCA “does not analyze everything there is to analyze in a text (no method could, nor would there be any purpose in trying)” (2013:88).

One thing I think is problematic with this study is that it is too ambitious and yet fails to serve its purpose. I don’t think a corpus of 962 articles published for a period of 1 month is enough to provide an adequate picture of the diversity in online newspaper and citizen journalism coverage in the whole of the United States.

Moreover, as the author admits, the fact that the websites that were researched are focused on geographic areas is a serious limitation. Perhaps she should have focused on one particular state and picked a longer time period for her research to make it more manageable and representative. 

Or she should have gone big and looked at a number of national newspaper websites, because those have much larger readerships and, I think, are the ones that have a real impact on readers and the society in general. Hense, their content diversity is much more important and representative of content diversity in the whole of the United States.  

Sources:

• Thody, A. (2006) Writing and Presenting Research, London: Sage
• Hansen,  A.  and  Machin,  D.  (2013) Media  &  Communication  Research  Methods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan