Is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Content analysis is considered a scholarrly methodology in the humanities by which texts are studied as to authorship, authenticity or menaing (e.g., Joubish & Khurram, 2011 AU45: The in-text citation "Joubish & Khurram, 2011" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ). This latter subject includes philology, hermeneutics and semiotics. The underlying assumption of content analysis is that the words and phrases mentioned most often in a text or series of texts are those that reflect the salient concerns of that particular discourse (e.g. Muema & Mutisya, 2012 ). McKeone (1995) highlighted the difference between prescriptive analysis and open analysis . In prescriptive analysis, the context is a closely defined set of communication parameters (e.g. specific messages); open analysis identifies the dominant messages and subject matter within the text. A further step in analysis is the distinction between quantitative approaches and qualitative approaches. Quantitative approaches set up a list of categories derived from the frequency list of words and control the distribution of words and their respective categories over the texts. While methods in quantitative content analysis in this way transform observations of found categories into quantitative statistical data, the qualitative content analysis focuses more on the intentionality and its implications.
Published in Chapter:
The Evolution of Consumerism in the Marketing Education: A Critical Discussion Based on Mezirow's Critical Reflection
George S. Spais (Graduate Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece, Greece)
Copyright: © 2014
|Pages: 33
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5880-6.ch003
Abstract
The chapter examines how consumerism- one of the primary key themes in marketing and business courses- has evolved the last decade and envisages the shape of these set of courses in the future. From the 1,935 words for 20 key-concepts counted in 141 online course descriptions in English of the last 10 periods delivered by Business and Management Schools or Business/Marketing Academic Depts. of 88 Universities and Colleges, “Marketing,” “business,” “ethics” and “social responsibility” were included in 100% of the course descriptions analyzed, indicating their coverage by all courses. In order to investigate the five (5) research objectives, HCA was adopted for an exploratory analysis based on single-linkage clustering method to reveal natural groupings of the key concepts within a data set of word counts that were not apparent and then multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. The trend analyses indicated prospects for the increasing focus around specific topics. The interpretation of the research results based on the assumptions of Mezirow's critical reflection provided very strong recommendations.