Surveys located

I have located at least two good surveys from the 2004 election. One is a CBS/NYT poll from March 10-14, 2004. The other is a Pew Research Center survey from June 17, 2004. Both of these have a portion devoted to asking respondents about particular issues and their importance. While they aren't exactly the same, most of the issues duplicate on both polls (which I consider a really good thing). If you want, I can copy out the results and e-mail them to you. The fact that the issues are almost the same and ranked in a similar order PLUS these are from two different time frames makes me think that we can use these to identify our party ideology. There are probably other surveys out there, but I'm inclined to say these are good enough for me. (Am I getting lazy, or am I just too concerned about time?????)

Getting back to work

The last week has been weird and stressful for all of us. I know that I basically got nothing done last week after the hurricane. I plan to get back to work on the research in the next couple of days, and I plan to have located some opinion polls from 2004 to use in the party ideology section. I will also review the van Dijk article (as I never finished it the first time), and I'll look over the research questions that Pete posted.

I think we need to settle on research questions before we approach the codesheet. Also, have we decided on inter-coder reliability stuff? I think Barry said that we need to do a couple of things in order to make sure that we're covered on that part of the research. I might need clarification on that issue.

Also, can we set a target date for beginning the coding? I feel time slipping away, and it makes me nervous.

Party platforms

OK, after looking through the Republican and Democractic web sites this afternoon, I think we will definitely want to locate some polls from 2004 that identify issues and then correlate each party's stand with those issues. I couldn't find anything approximating what we're looking for on the official home pages. The Democratic Party has a list of issue areas (such as economic growth, education, health care, strength overseas, etc.), but it isn't really presented as a definitive "stand." Sometimes it's comments about current news topics filtered through the Demo lens.

I located copies of the party platforms from 2004, and we DEFINITELY do not want to do a content analysis on these documents. The Republican plaform is 81 pages, and the Democrat platform is 43 pages. There's a ton of rhetoric and posturing, but specific issues and areas are addressed. I think that we can tie these to poll data and have our representative ideology.

My head hurts after going through all this. I think I'm done for today. Not sure I have enough sparks left to consider all the intercoder reliability stuff. ;o)

Intercoder Reliability

I think we need to establish intercoder reliability for our content analysis. How we do it will depend on how we divide up the content analysis workload. Two potential ways of doing this are: each of us analyzing one-third of the ads, or each of us analyzing all the ads for one-third of the parameters.

I don't have the number of ads in front of me, but I think it's around 30. If there are 30 ads, we could each analyze 10 ads. Then each of us could re-analyze one ad from each of the other two folks' sections. (So we each would analyze 12 ads.) The three ads we all have analyzed in common would serve as our intercoder reliability sample. The rough Venn diagram illustrates this method.

The alternative method would involve splitting up the parameters instead of the ads. I'm not sure how many parameters we will wind up with, but the same idea would apply. We each do our section and then a small sample of the others' sections. That sample winds up being the intercoder reliability sample.

I think either method has pros and cons. In the first method, we don't analyze that many ads each, but we probably have to make several passes through each ad to make sure we don't miss anything. With the second method, we each have to analyze all the ads, but only for one-third of the code-sheet parameters, so we might have to make fewer passes through each ad.

Thoughts?

Party Platforms and Issues

I'm sure we could scare up a few polls (from during the election season) that indicate which issues were most important to voters. We could select these issues, or a sub-set of these issues, as the ones which we'll check party platforms on.

I've no doubt that voter-rated importance of issues varies across time--probably more so than party platform planks. If we just need to identify a set of issues that could be used to differentiate parties, though, we could still pull issues from the polling data without regards to which issue(s) may be temporarily more important than others.

Does that make any sense?

How to pinpoint party ideology

OK, Barry brought up a good point. How can we identify party ideology in the platform without doing a content analysis of the platforms, which I would prefer to avoid?

Is there some way to choose certain topics and then look for the party stance on these issues?

Thoughts???

Possible research questions

OK, the title of this post is a bit misleading. It might make you think that I have actually crafted some research questions. What I've actually done is identified some POSSIBLE research questions/areas for us. I'd like for you to consider them, give me your comments, and offer up any research questions that you consider possibilities for this research. After we develop the research questions (or hypotheses) then we can work on modifying the codesheet.

My current thinking is that we have no more than four or five research questions or hypotheses, so we have our work cut out for us.

BTW, these are arranged in no particular order. I have stars beside the ones that I like the best.

* 1. Do the 527 ads affirm or rebut party ideology as expressed in party platforms?
*2. If so, is this done primarily verbally or non-verbally?
* 3. Are 527 ads more likely to produce ads that use story-telling conventions such as drama, narrative and testimonials than conventions such as voice-over or ????.
4. Do 527s use more emotional appeals than non-emotional?
*5. If so, what type of emotional appeals are most often used?
6. Are 527 ads more likely to focus on single image characteristics, such as experience, loyalty, trustworthiness, etc.?
7. Kaid found that 527 ads more more focused on image than issues. What were the most frequently found values or characteristics in the ads? (trustworthiness, competence, loyalty, patriotism, etc.)
*8. What image of candidates was presented in candidate-positive 527 ads? (qualities stressed in the ads)
9. How did the 527 ads portray the Iraq War? (if they did)
10. How did the 527 ads portray the American economy?
* 11. What emotional style was used most often in the 527 ads? (Positive, Negative, Cynical, Upbeat, etc.) (there's some prior research in this area)
12. What was the predominant symbolism found in the ads? (flag, heroism, American dream, patriotism, etc.)
*13. Are attack ads more likely to be based on logical, emotional or ethos appeals?
*14. Are the support ads more likely to be based on logical, emotional or ethos appeals?

Barry had asked how Kaid distinguished between verbal and non-verbal content in the videostyle codesheet. I'm going to post some comments from the book about the categories, and I hope that it will help us as we struggle to code the codesheet ;o). BTW, she compiled this list from several sources and basically pulled together categories from several other researchers.

Verbal content: focuses on the semantic characteristics of the candidate's message. What is said in the ad, both in sound and printed messages, makes up this content. Aspects of verbal content include: specific issues or specific candidate characteristics attributed to an image (honest, competent, experienced, compassionate, etc.); Negative or Positive content, depending on whether it focuses on the candidate or the opponent; explicit and implicit values conveyed in a spot; explicit strategies or tactics; partisianship (repub or demo); candidate's status as incumbent or challenger; language that is particularly emotion or dramatic.

Coding for veral went as such: coded for image or issue focus, partisan appeals, group appeals, logical, emotional or ethical appeals, personal qualities of candidates, and type of issue content. Also coded for positive or negative, strategies and values contained in the spots.

Non-verbal content: visual elements that do not have specific semantic meaning (sounds, voice inflections, etc.). In this category you would find things such as: aspects of performance (eye contact, appearance, body movement); cues such as the flag and other symbols of power; environmental factors such as music, lighting and colors; physical characteristics such as attractiveness, body weight and height; voice qualities; whether candidate appears or is absent from the ad.

Coding for non-verbal content went as such: setting of ads, eye contact, facial expression, body movement, fluency, rate of speech, pitch and dress. Also coded for dominant speaker in the ad.

Production Components: includes particular production techniques such as: camera angles, lighting, movement, color, editing, music and sound (not sure how she distinguishes this from non-verbal), staging and setting, special effects. I think the she might distinguish some of these from non-verbal by stating that these "techiques can produce emotions or feelings, convey specific information and cause us to interpret what we see in different ways." She has a four-page description of this category, and I would be happy to make copies if you'd like to read it.

Coding for production components went as such: dominant format, presence of music in ads, presence of various techniques )such as cinema verite, animation, etc.), staging, sound characteristics, dominant camera angle, dominant camera shot used, special effects.

I hope that this is helpful. Please let me know if you have questions, or if I've overlooked something.

Proposed definition of ideology

One of the things we've been struggling with is an operationalization of the term "ideology." I've reviewed some materials this morning, and I'd like to suggest a definition used by Teun van Dijk, who has been doing work in this area for several years.

Van Dijk sees ideology as playing an important role in the social representations shared by members of a group (1998, p. 8). According to van Dijk, ideology is not necessarily a person’s individual beliefs, but instead makes up “socially shared, general beliefs” (1998, p. 32). It is important to note that van Dijk says these are basic social beliefs, but that they are actually “rooted in the general beliefs of whole societies or cultures” (1998, p. 314). He says that discourse has an important role in the reproduction of ideology — which is good for us as we'll be looking at mass media messages. He also says that ideologies regulate and organize the knowledge and attitudes of a group. Once again, this could be useful in our research. (More on the discussed theoretical aspects later.)

Van Dijk says that "ideologies form the basis of belief systems or social representations of specific groups." This definition would work well for out study, as we are looking at specific groups — Democrat and Republican parties — and their espoused ideologies.

I propose that we all three read van Dijk's latest publication about this. It's really not a difficult read, and quite applicable to our subject. Here's the cite: van Dijk, T. (2001). Discourse, Ideology and Context. Folia Linguistica, Vol. 35, Issue 1/2, p. 11 (30). There is a full text copy available.

I'm still working through the articles that Pete collected and sent to me yesterday. I'll comment on those as soon as I can.

Lots of stuff to discuss

After spending two hours just talking about ideology matters last night, Barry and I decided we needed a better way to have a three-way exchange without everyone being in the same room. This is my attempt to create a space in which we can do that. I have several things that I will be posting later today, most of which will involve the ideology component of the research. I will also post some proposed research questions that we can debate, refine or toss out completely. I hope that this site will allow us to move more quickly in getting the methodology, research questions and codesheet finished so that we can proceed with the analysis.

Melissa