42 Therefore, the researcher decided to focus on the one-week-data and gain rich
description from it.
D. Research Instrument and Data Gathering Technique
Using content analysis as the research method, the researcher became the human instrument of this research. What is meant by human instrument is the
researcher herself. This is one of the characteristics of qualitative research. Ary, Jacobs, and Razavieh 2002 state that in qualitative research, the researcher
always needs human instrument who can read all the data, talk with people, and observe the social phenomenon p.424. Moreover, Merriam 2002 states that
human instruments plays important roles in qualitative research p.15. Human instrument, which is the researcher, is the ideal instrument for collecting and
analyzing the data in qualitative research. In gathering the data, the researcher collected The Jakarta Post newspaper
on July 1
st,
2013 until July 15
th
, 2013. The researcher retrieved the data from the official The Jakarta Post website, www.thejakartapost.com. This site also
provides the printed edition of the newspaper. From the website, the researcher takes the article from the Reader’s Forum section. There are 4 sub-sections in
Reader’s Forum. They are Your Letter, Text your Say, Issue of the Day, and Comment.
There were several steps in collecting the data. The first thing is accessing the official website of The Jakarta Post newspaper. After that, the researcher went
directly to the printed edition of The Jakarta Post newspaper that is available in
43 the website by clicking the printed edition sign. Since the data were retrieved in
the same date as the newspaper edition, the researcher did not need to look for the older edition. Next, the researcher went to the Reader’s Forum section. There, the
researcher could find the sub-sections of the Reader’s Forum section and also the articles.
Figure 3.1. The Jakarta Post Official Website
E. Data Analysis Technique
This study is dealt with the meaning and interpretation. Therefore, the researcher will begin the data analysis by perusing the data. By doing so, the
writer can find the exact interpretation of each sentence. Since the study is about ambiguity, if the researcher found some words or sentences that have more than
one interpretation, they would directly become the focus of the study. The ambiguous word or sentence will be put in the table to make it easier for the
researcher in managing the data. The researcher would also underline the word or
44 phrase that trigger the ambiguity to happen. The table used in the study is
presented in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Data Organizational Table
No Date of
publication Article title
Types of Ambiguity Sentence
Lexical Struct.
1. 2.
When the data has been arranged in the table, the researcher will focus on the lexical ambiguity first. After that, the researcher would like to describe the
interpretations of ambiguous words and phrases based on the data in Table 3.1. The next step is analyzing lexical ambiguity. The researcher will again put the
data in the table. While in the first step the researcher will type the complete sentence, in doing this second step, the researcher would only list the lexically
ambiguous word in the table. However, the table is based on the part of speech. By categorizing the words based on their part of speech, the researcher hopes that
it might be helpful to find the most ambiguous part of speech.
Table 3.2. Lexical Ambiguity Table
No Words
Parts of Speech N
V Adj
Adv Prep
Con Int
1. 2.
Note: N : Noun
V : Verb
Adj : Adjective
Adv : Adverb
Con : Conjunction
Int : Interjection
After that, the researcher would continue the study by analyzing the structural ambiguity using tree diagram. This step will answer the second research
46 problem. In doing so, the researcher used free software that can be downloaded in
the internet called Tree Form version 1.0.3. The researcher found it easier to use than drawing the tree diagram. The preview of Tree Form version 1.0.3 can be
seen in Figure 3.2.
Figure 3.2. Tree Form 1.0.3
The last step is summarizing and concluding the data. When the lexical data has been analyzed according to its category and the phrase or sentence has
been analyzed using the tree diagram, the researcher will draw conclusion as the result of the study.
F. Research Procedure
