CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD
A. The Research Design
This research employed a descriptive qualitative method since the data were in the form of words and texts rather than numbers. A qualitative research is
a study aimed to understand on processes and meanings of a social aspect or experience. According to Denzin and Lincoln 2000:8 qualitative research
emphasis on the qualities of entities and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured in terms of quantity, amount, intensity, or
frequency and stresses on how social experience is created and given meaning. The purpose of qualitative research is not to measure but to describe and explore
about the phenomenon. In line with Denzin and Lincoln, Vanderstoep and Johnston 2009:7 say that “qualitative research produces narrative or textual
descriptions of the phenomena under study”. Thus, this approach allowed the researcher to explain the meanings and interpretations of the research topic.
To analyze the data, the researcher used qualitative content analysis. Content analysis in qualitative research is a research method to create subjective
interpretation of the context of text data by making a systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns Hsieh and Shannon,
2005:1278. Content analysis provides a technique to grasp the meanings of the data based on their context. It helped the researcher to have clear interpretations
and understand the meaning of the text.
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B. The Data and the Source of Data
Since this research used qualitative method that its focus to analyze the repressive ideologies of the ruling class and the author’s ideology expressed in
Sinclair’s novel The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America, the data of this research were in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences which were in
line with the research topic. Then, the main source of this research is The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
, a novel written by Upton Sinclair. It was first published in 1937. The researcher used the second edition of the novel from
Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company which consists of 119 pages. This research also used the secondary data in the form of books, articles,
e-books, and website related to the topic discussed in this research. This research used the Karl Marx’s theory of Ideology taken from Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory
Today: A User-friendly Guide 2nd edition 2006 as the main theory and some
additional books on Marxist study were also used to support the analysis process.
C. The Data Collection Technique
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