What are the seven major elements in written messages, and what is their importance?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

1. Words: The word is the smallest unit of content analysis, often used in frequency distribution of specified words or terms.
2. Themes: The theme is more useful to count than the word. It is a simple sentence, a string of words with a subject and a predicate.
3. Characters: Characters are the people who are significant to the analysis. In these cases, you count the number of times a specific person is mentioned.
4. Paragraphs: The paragraph is infrequently used as the basic unit of content analysis because it is difficult to code and classify the numerous thoughts contained in a single paragraph. If each paragraph contains a unique idea or claim, this is a useful way to code.
5. Items: An item is a whole unit of the sender's message (e.g., an entire book, a letter, speech, diary, in-depth interview, and so forth).
6. Concepts: Concepts are words grouped together into conceptual clusters (ideas) that constitute variables in a research hypothesis. For example, clusters may form around the idea of deviance with words such as crime, delinquency, and fraud clustering around the concept. This is a sophisticated way of word counting.
7. Semantics: When counting semantics, researchers are interested in not only the number and type of words, but also in how affected the words may be (how weak or strong a word is) in relation to the rest of the sentence.