33 drama and, in turn, lead to a deeper understanding on maxim-flouting among
English-speaking people. In order to answer the two questions, the Content Analysis method
described in the next section was selected as it was the most suitable research method for fulfilling the research goals. The first step is determining the content
category required for the study to accomplish its goals. The second step is the process of coding, which is carried out to gather the required data from the
dialogues for analysis. In this step, maxim-flouting utterances are gathered with its containing dialogue and the maxims that are flouted are determined. The third step
is to carry out an implicature and speaker motivation analysis to determine both the implicature and the motivation behind the flouting. The answers collected
from these steps will enable a final conclusion to be drawn as to how people in general flout maxims and why. These steps are further described in the following
four sections that follows: 1 The Content Analysis Method, 2 Research Instrument, 3 The Gathering of Maxim-Flouting Utterances, and 4 The
Implicature Analysis.
1. The Content Analysis Method
In order to answer the guiding research questions and to achieve the goals of this study, it is essential that this research does an in-depth analysis on what is
spoken by the characters in the episode “Occam’s Razor”, since the focus of the study is never on the utterances spoken, but on the implicatures that the maxim-
flouting utterances convey. The content analysis method, therefore, is chosen for
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34 this study as it is able to go beyond actual sentences to retrieve and analyze the
message contained within utterances. The content analysis method is defined by Bernard Berelson 1952 as “a
research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”. It is also defined by Krippendorf 1980
as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context”. These definitions reveal that that content analysis is a method that
focuses on systematic analysis on the contents of a text and its contexts, in order to arrive at valid inferences regarding the text itself.
The main objective of the method is to adapt text into categorized data, which can then be scientifically examined in order that certain inferences can be
gained. It is therefore essential that a content analysis research has the appropriate
content categories to analyze and a good process of coding, that is, a process of
identification and harvesting of data spread throughout the text into observable data categories. Indeed, the four main issues of content analysis are: selection of
units of analysis, developing categories, sampling appropriate content, and checking reliability of coding
Stempel, 1989. This research method has been used extensively in quantitative researches,
such as for dissecting texts and providing objective representations in numbers and percentages of, for example, the occurrence of words or concepts that
represents a specific theme under investigation via coding. Taviss 1969, for instance, analyzed popular novels between the 1900s and the 1950s to assess his
hypothesis that in middle class American society, self-alienation had been
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35 increasing while social alienation had been decreasing. He confirms the
hypothesis when he found that that in the overall rise in alienation themes in novels, there was a large increase in self-alienation and a slight decrease in social
alienation. However, there is an increase in the use of this method in qualitative
researches, which generally focuses on the characteristics of language in communication, with attention paid to the content or contextual meaning of the
text McTavish Pirro, 1990; Tesch, 1990. Clearly, this development on the use of qualitative content analysis is more appropriate for this current study into
maxim flouting to employ, considering its aim to uncover accurate implicature processing of contextual maxim-flouting utterances.
Therefore, in this study, the qualitative content analysis is thus defined as a research method for obtaining a systematic and subjective interpretation on the
implicatures of utterances through the systematic process of coding and analysis.
2. Research Instrument
