Quadrangle Squabbles

The main tension I picked up on during this week’s readings (and the stuff I was reading for the peer review assignment) was various camps arguing over who gets to use the term “Content Analysis” for what types of research. Most people seem to see some in both qualitative and quantitative methods as having something to offer. The main controversy seems to be if “content analysis” should be a big tent encompassing all sorts of textual analysis, or if the qualitative people need to go start their own tent. On a related topic, based on Jesse’s comment last week about Luker’s position on Content Analysis, I found an endnote in her book (p281) that explained how Linguistics and Political Science still (surprisingly) used content analysis, but that it was pretty well dead in sociology. This seems to amount to varying research fashions between disciplines. As an ends justifies means type of person, I really don’t have much patients for these types of debates (unless they are entertaining). Personally, I find these controversies a distracting sideshow and I really don’t care. What I want to know is if the researches they are publishing tell me something new, or makes me think about something in a different way.