The "President or Dictator?" article

I just read the "President or Dictator?" article that is among our choices for the peer review assignment. It alarmed me by how irrelevant the selected methodology is to the study's thesis statement. I found it surprising that the group of authors did not recognize that. Does anyone else see this or am I completely off?..

The study proposes to "examine the role the media plays in [the US policy positions towards Cuba] to determine if the Cuban-American media is reflecting these views". The study then goes on to gather quantitative data to reveal the amount of times positive and negative descriptors are used in the same sentences as "Fidel", "Raul Castro", and "Cuba" in four American newspapers. This is content analysis, which, I think, works well to determine how much more frequently the three words above are used negatively versus positively, but, unfortunately, it does not offer examination of the media role in people's views! And yet media role in people's view is what the researchers propose to examine in the beginning. Luker says in chapter 8, that when it comes to content analysis she is "skeptical that we can show anything other than a correlation." This method "can only find the distribution of a population into categories that we have defined a priori". The information collected in this study using this method is not enough to offer analysis of the Cuban-American community and its views. And yet, upon presentation of the results, the conclusion of the study attempts to offer qualitative analysis. All of a sudden, in the last paragraph it offers a new idea: "the Cuban-American population  <...> has a more negative opinion of Castro to begin with". How is this clear from the data collected? How do we know from the data examined what views the Cuban-American population had "to begin with"?

The researchers of this paper also failed to successfully justify the use of their method other than noting that it would be not too expensive...

This study is an example of how not to choose irrelevant tools to answer your research question. It is also, maybe, an example of how sometimes it is necessary to completely change your research question after you have collected the data. I found this article to be a troubling example of a mistake that can easily happen to me and to anybody in research work. I guess I have a lot to say about this one, so I'll choose it for the assignment. Who is with me?