Textual analysis
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Ideological approaches
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Ideology is a system of ideas or beliefs
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All media products are actually products of ideology
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Often the ideology is actually implicit rather than covert and one has to read into the
text to find the ideology at work
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The purpose of discovering the ideology or system of belief underlying a message is at
the root of most forms of textual analysis
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There isn’t an actual method called ideological analysis – but any method can be used as
part of an ideological project
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The most renowned scholars of ideology in the media are Max Horkheimer and Thoedor
Adorno
Discourse analysis
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Discourse analysis looks at the social action and interaction, people interacting together
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And understands language as social construction
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It is argued that the choices made by journalists, and other media producers, articulate
and enact social power
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So they will ensure that representations do not jeopardise their interests and privileges
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The kind of questions that are answered by discourse analysis include
– How the world, is represented
– What identities are set up for those involved
– What relationships are set up between those involved
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– So one of the things you can do in discourse analysis is to compare the words
that are used about topics, compare the choices made and what can be inferred
about these choices.
Content analysis
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This is a research tool that can be used to find out the presence of certain words or
concepts within a text
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So you can actually count, quantify the presence of these words or concepts and then
make inferences about them
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So we could look at advertising in magazines and focus on, for example, how women are
portrayed in the magazines
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Or, as I currently have, one student comparing the representation of sports women in
newspapers
Narrative and Genre
Thematic analysis
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The researcher identifies themes from the material being analysed
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The main point is to try and identify themes which are integral to the research
question
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Often this will lead to other research methods being used
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It is about finding patterns in the data in relation to the theme or topic
Genre
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One of the key ways in which films have been developed and marketed is along the
lines of genre
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The classic Hollywood films are often described in terms of genre
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Some are more/less popular in different eras
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Genre research investigates films and television programmes by relating them to the
other programmes/films of the same genre
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There are also codes and conventions of a genre such as location, style etc.
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Genre analysis may look at how elements are reinvented or reinterpreted as in the
western
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Genres do change
Narrative
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In narrative analysis we take the entire text as our object of study
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Focus on the structure of the story or the narrative
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Stories are fundamental and media products are structured around narrative
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Narrative analysis used to unpack ideological intent
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One of the key approaches to narrative analysis derives from Propp’s morphology of
the Folk Tale
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Found similarities in structure of stories across a wide variety of folk tales
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So the hero is the person who is set a task
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The donor is the character who gives the hero something to help him or her in the
task
Audience research methods
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you might also want to find out audience reaction or opinions or response to media
texts.
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This area is called audience research.
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Interviews
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Interviews tend to fall into these three types – informal where the interview is
completely unplanned
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There are also completely formal or structured interviews, where you don’t deviate
at all from the list of questions.
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There is also semi-structured interviews, where you have a list of questions, but you
don’t necessarily have to follow them all in a set order, and you can expand on
things that are of interest.
Focus groups
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Another useful method is the focus group
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This is where you have 6-10 people and you get them to discuss something.
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Again, this is useful for getting more than one viewpoint and for capturing a
discussion – which is sometimes lacking in interviews.
Questionnaires
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Questionnaires give you a different kind of information to the qualitative methods I
have just mentioned
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These tend to give you quantitative information and are useful for gathering
information about a topic
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There are different types of questions – you can use open ended questions where
people can write a few sentences, or closed questions which are the yes no type
questions.
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Again these give you different responses
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