This report describes the results of a study of family role structures and family role interaction patterns of U.S. television families appearing during prime time and Saturday morning programs for the 1976-1977 season. The content analysis constitutes a role-by-behavior description of verbal interaction among television families, the coding unit…

This report describes a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically rich, naturalistic domains, primarily in the domain of the stock market. The methods and results of six separate experiments on…

Sesame Street programs are perpetuating the subjugated role of females by presenting a picture of male-dominated society while portraying females in roles of following, cleaning, mothering and imitating, and as being of limited intelligence, subservient and passive. Analysis of a randomly chosen Sesame Street program (#189) shows how the series…

Theories of communication can be applied to case studies in human behavior drawn from short stories, novels, plays, and screenplays, in addition to standard psychological texts and personal experiences of class members. One example is A.H. Maslow's concept of self-actualization exemplified by the character of Phineas in John Knowles'"A…

An examination of the coverage of Latin America during 1977 by "Newsweek,""Time," and "U.S. News and World Report" was undertaken to compare the number of stories and the amount of space devoted to that region with that afforded other areas of the world. The results showed that of the major areas of the world, only…

Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad is an analytical device intended to be used by critics to discover the roots of motivation for particular acts. The five elements of the pentad are the scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose. Using the Burkean Pentad, this symposium presents the following five analyses of Watergate: "Scenic Responsibility:…

Three news magazines ("Time,""Newsweek," and "U.S. News and World Report") and three opinion magazines ("The Nation,""The New Republic," and "National Review") were assessed with regard to their coverage of Africa. Analysis of the magazines' contents indicated that, on an overall basis,…

The purpose of this study was to examine and evaluate the portrayal of death in selected fiction books for children. The sample consisted of 90 books which were listed by six authors discussing the appearance of the death theme in children's books. A method of content analysis was applied as the research design, and each book was analyzed on the…

Given that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) seems to stress national identity and the importance of developing Canadian perspectives on world events, this study examines whether the CBC practices "Afghanistanism," i.e., the tendency to be more critical when reporting, reviewing, or commenting on news events and personalities…

This paper discusses some of the procedures for assessing specific content in books, suggests some ideas for activities which adolescents could select to demonstrate that they can recognize and judge certain elements in books, and lists several cautions which need to be considered when analyzing content. The first procedure in a content analysis…

In order to test the hypothesis that dogmatism is related to the understanding and appreciation of editorial satires, 116 University of Georgia speech students read and reacted to three editorial satires (two by Art Hoppe and one by Art Buchwald) arranged in booklets in three different orders. Students were asked to choose from a list of five…

Since the 1960s, adolescent novels treating racial strife have paralleled the civil rights movement. Before then, adolescent novels were oriented toward a white, middle-class audience, with settings in small towns and characters who were teenage Anglo-Saxons. Novels in the 1950s were, for the most part, unrealistic in their portrayals of racial…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the results of the mediational process of the press to discover how much and in what ways press reports of Agnew's speeches differed from his original speeches. Comparisons were made between the coverage produced by the press reports and manuscripts of Agnew's speeches in order to discover how much of the…

The major purpose of this study was to investigate expressive content language differences in preschool black children that might relate to Piaget's theory of egocentric speech. Correlating first order Harvard III Psycho-sociological Dictionary categories with Piaget's egocentric speech and the second order categories with socialized speech it was…

Most existing automatic content analysis and indexing techniques are based on work frequency characteristics applied largely in an ad hoc manner. Contradictory requirements arise in this connection, in that terms exhibiting high occurrence frequencies in individual documents are often useful for high recall performance (to retrieve many relevant…