INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

In historical accounts of mass communication research, the term qualitative content analysis is sometimes linked with the name of Siegfried Kracauer, the German sociologist and cultural critic who moved to the USA as a refugee in the late 1930s and later established himself as an important film theorist in the 1940s and 1950s. Kracauer may not have been the first to use the term, but he did indeed write what may be regarded as the manifesto of qualitative content analysis. In “The challenge of qualitative content analysis” (1953), Kracauer dealt a severe blow to the type of quantitative content analysis practiced by many contemporary mass communication researchers, and instead made a plea for qualitative, hermeneutic, or humanistic procedures. While the article is rooted in the author’s own analytical and political experiences in the context of the Frankfurt School and in the works of fellow refugees such as Theodor Adorno and Leo Lowenthal, there is a clear continuity of Kracauer’s argument with later and current debates on the relevance of qualitative approaches to media content. Thus, the article offers a useful framework for considering some general principles and issues of textual analysis of fictional media content.

Taking as his point of departure Bernard Berelson’s classic Content Analysis in Communication Research (1952), Kracauer argued that the proposed quantitative strategies for determining the content or meaning of media messages are, if not useless, then certainly not as objective and reliable as suggested by Berelson and others. Indeed, quantitative studies may only serve as a supplement to qualitative analyses. According to Kracauer, the inadequacy of quantitative analyses stems

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from the methods themselves: when trying to establish the meaning of texts by breaking them down into quantifiable units (words, expressions, statements, etc.), analysts in fact destroy the very object they are supposed to be studying, since the atomistic character of the resulting data precludes

a relevant examination of the relations within each text as a meaningful whole. Though, in quantitative research, the textual units are often rated with reference to various graded scales, still the initial segmentation of the text, the choice of scales, as well as the rating of textual units tend to be based on tacit categories of a fairly primitive kind, which, furthermore, originate outside the text. In Kracauer’s (1953:637) words, the categories are “opinion-laden short cuts” to analysis.

By contrast, Kracauer’s central argument is that the content of a text must be conceived as a meaningful whole, and hence that analysis necessarily involves an act of interpretation which, like other readings, is based on specific assumptions to be made explicit in the course of analysis:

Documents which are not simply agglomerations of facts participate in the process of living, and every word in them vibrates with the intentions in which they originate and simultaneously fore-shadows the indefinite effects they may produce. Their content is no longer their content if it is detached from the texture of intimations and implications to which it belongs and taken literally; it exists only with and within this texture—a still fragmentary manifestation of life, which depends upon response to evolve its properties. Most communications are not so much fixed entities as ambivalent challenges. They challenge the reader or the analyst to absorb them and react to them. Only in approaching these wholes with his whole being will the analyst be able both to discover and determine their meaning—or one of their meanings—and thus help them to fulfill themselves.

(Kracauer, 1953:641)

The text, then, should not be regarded as a closed, segmented object with determinate, composite meanings, but rather as an indeterminate field of meaning in which intentions and possible effects intersect. The task of the analyst is to bring out the whole range of possible meanings, not least the “hidden” message of the text.

The distinction between manifest and latent, or surface and deep, meanings is well known from the humanistic tradition of textual

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interpretation (see Chapter 1 in this volume); for Kracauer, qualitative content analysis is synonymous with exegesis. The humanistic tradition, specifically the German Geistesgeschichte, receives a characteristic inflection in Kracauer and other representatives of the Frankfurt School. Even while media texts are thought of as complex and indeterminate, they are also said to be historically determined to the extent that they express the general ideological trends (Zeitgeist) of a given period, which minimizes the danger of “subjective” misinterpretations. Crucially, following the knowledge interests of the Frankfurt School, the deciphering of latent meanings through qualitative content analysis implies a deconstruction of ideology and

a critique of its social origins with a view to political action. Like other early qualitative content analysts, Kracauer did not offer any systematic methodology or approach. Studies of film, popular fiction, news, and some other genres relied on procedures from traditional literary analysis of canonical works, offering interpretations or “readings” of media (and not very “close” readings) (see Kracauer, 1947 and 1974 on film; Kracauer, 1963 on bestsellers; Lowenthal, 1961 on popular literature; also the overviews in Jay, 1973, and Negt, 1980). Compared to research on a small number of literary “masterpieces,” modern media texts posed problems of both heterogeneity and sheer quantity. However, during the 1950s and 1960s more adequate tools of analysis were being developed, particularly within general semiology or semiotics, which promised to solve both these problems. This development calls for a brief overview of previous research in the next section. Next, some specific examples of studies of media texts are presented in order to illustrate the procedures of qualitative content analysis. In conclusion, this chapter discusses the continued relevance and possible integration of literary analysis in mass communication research.