Something smells fishy...

There were two things in the methodology section of Bimber and Davis’ book (pg. 173-189) that seemed a little fishy to me… First, there was the coding of the candidate’s websites where the authors note that not all the graphics and pictures were visible (they downloaded the sites and did content analysis offline); but that they weren’t too troubled by it because they said they were more concerned with the text.

Umm, isn’t that a red flag?

I mean I would think that a majority of the people that skim the website are drawn right to the pictures/graphics, and even if they do read over the website the particular words will be forgotten and the images will stick with them. The second red flag that went up when I was reading this section was the part where the researchers explain that they conducted content analysis from open-ended questions which is heavily subjective – even more so because they drew a sample of 1,000 and were able to boil all those answers down to eight categories…. Did anyone else think this was a bit odd?