To determine whether journalists withhold mobilizing information (any information that allows people to act on the attitudes and desires they already have), 56 professional journalists were asked to edit a nine-paragraph story about a wave of beetles that supposedly threatened large stands of timber. There were two versions of this story: the…

A deconstruction of music videos that makes visible their aesthetic rules or grammar is necessary before an overall theoretical understanding is possible. Content-analytic studies usually divide music videos into two groups: "performance" and "concept" videos. Concept videos, in turn, can be subdivided into two different kinds:…

A study was conducted to discover why investigation of one of the most important trends in the newspaper industry during the past century, the decline of newspaper competition within a city, has produced conflicting results. The study reviewed existing literature to learn why this is so, and also to determine if direct daily newspaper competition…

A study examined contemporary reactions of the Black American press to the relocation and internment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Noting that the Black American press has been an activist press since its inception in 1827, it was hypothesized that Black newspapers would editorialize against the internment of Japanese…

The use of computer conferencing (CC) to support undergraduate distance learners will, presumably, lower attrition rates for distance learners by providing students with the ability to exchange ideas and develop insights with others, overcoming the intellectual and social isolation associated with correspondence courses. It will be years before…

A content analysis of the photographs included in four employee magazines was conducted for the period of 1978 to 1983 to investigate the manner in which the publications used photographs to carry messages about people, their relationship to the organization, and the work environment. The publications selected for analysis were all employee…

A study assessed the relationship between formal main idea statements in text and substantive material that students need to understand the key concepts in textbooks. The study addressed two questions: (1) What percentage of textbook paragraphs contains material important for understanding major textbook concepts? and (2) How important are formal…

If content analysis is to satisfy the requirement of objectivity, measures and procedures must be reliable. Reliability is usually measured by the proportion of agreement of all categories identically coded by different coders. For such data to be empirically meaningful, a high degree of inter-coder reliability must be demonstrated. Researchers in…

The portrayal of reading, writing, and other selected behaviors on prime-time network television was examined in this two-part study. First, an interest inventory was administered to a sample of 301 elementary students (i.e., grades 1-5) in South Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to determine their favorite television shows, books, and school…

To examine how media content is influenced by journalists' role concepts and organizational characteristics, a study used data which was originally gathered from telephone interviews with 1,001 American journalists conducted between December 1982 and February 1983, and which served as the basis for "The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S.…

To examine how United States network news personalizes coverage of international terrorism, a study conducted a content analysis of videotaped reports relating to the TWA airliner hijacking of June 1985. Videotapes of the TWA hostage incident from "ABC World News Tonight,""CBS Evening News," and "NBC Nightly News"…

To investigate whether researchers are developing empirically-based public relations research efforts, and whether such efforts could be considered useful to public relations practitioners, a study conducted a content analysis of all articles published in "Public Relations Review" from 1977 through 1987. Articles (196 were coded in all)…

In this study, 484 dissertations written from 1976 to 1985 were reviewed to determine the content of curriculum dissertations and the methodology employed. "Dissertation Abstracts International" was the data source for dissertations. Sixteen categories emerged as appropriate for classifying the content foci of the studies. Descriptions and…

This investigation of some of the meanings of "woman" that are produced and negotiated in the interaction of television representations, viewer receptions, and the historical/industry context focuses on the "Cagney and Lacey" series--produced in the United States--as a particular instance of the cultural production and…

The image and interactions of the black family depicted on television were investigated in order to determine whether changes occurred in the imagery and interactions of black television families between 1980 and 1985, and to compare the family structures and interactive behavior on situation comedies portraying nuclear black families during the…