What statistical analysis should I use?

What is the best way to use the Social Science Statistical Programme SPSS in a Content Analysis?

• I am doing a Content Analysis of the "letter to the editor" column of 4 newspapers. I want to determine the willingness of people to accept cultural norms different to their own. What is the best way to make use of SPSS to illustrate my findings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thank you.

• Answer:

  Wow, I actually did something similar to this for my Honors thesis. I studied letters to the editor over a 35-year period to see how arguments about homosexuality changed. I started with a set of argument frames that was looking for, in my case I was looking for "gay is good," "Minority," "Equal Rights." "Sin," "Disease Vector," and "Mental Illness" I created a basic score sheet for each letter to the editor. The sheet included the basic reference information to the article, like the paper it appeared in, the date, the page, things like that. The sheet had space to score a few other things I was analyzing, like the language tone, whether the letter was pro or anti-gay, things like that. Then I had each possible argument frame listed with an open box next to it. If the frame was present in the letter, I checked that particular box. Finally at the end of the sheet, I left some space to make any special notes I Felt needed to be made for the article. Once this was done, I entered the information from the sheets into SPSS. Basically I assigned a numerical code to each bit of information. Every article had it's own identifying code, which was created by putting the date, page number, and an additional number in case of there being more than one article on a particular day. So an article that appeared on January 23, 1978 on page 4 would be coded as 197901230401. I put this code on my scoring sheets as well so I knew exactly which article went with which data. the frames were either present or absent, so they were each scored with a 1 or a 0. As far as presentation, it's highly dependent on what information you are trying to convey. I was doing a longitudinal analysis, so a line or bar graph worked best for me. It's the graph that most clearly showed how the salience of particular argument frames shifted in time. Data that is presented in Percentages is almost always best presented in a pie chart. Bear in mind also, that SPSS is a statistics software, and works best for quantitative analysis. If your content analysis is more qualitative (and most content analysis are) then SPSS might not be the best way to aggregate your data.