Qualitative Content Analysis

In line with this study’s fourth research question, which seeks to document and analyse the kinds of political discourses circulated by youth activists on Facebook groups and profile pages, I also used qualitative thematic/content analysis. Content analysis refers to a quantitative method for the “objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson, 1952: 18; see also Krippendorf, 1969). Quantitative content analysis is concerned with identifying and counting the frequency of particular traits of a media text so as to deduce and establish certain causal relationships between variables and their wider social significance (Deacon, Pickering, Golding & Murdock, 2007: 119). Because of the interpretive thrust of this study, I used qualitative thematic/ content analysis. Qualitative thematic/content analysis refers to a technique that goes beyond examining the manifest contents or surface structures of a media text, by attempting to unearth its latent/implicit messages or the “deep structural readings” (Wigston, 2009: 5; Berg, 1998; Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009). It is a research method for the “subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying theme or patterns” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005: 1278). Unlike quantitative content analysis, which is based on predefined categories, the qualitative content analysis is concerned with uncovering themes found in content to address latent meanings contained within texts (Mayring, 1999). Media texts are considered to be constitutive of various social meanings which are situated in particular social contexts (Deacon et al., 1999; Altheide, 1987). As such, qualitative content analysis allowed me to identify important themes or categories within a body of Facebook content (text, images, audio), and to provide

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a rich description of the social reality created by those themes/categories as they are lived out in a particular setting (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009; Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).

As Huang (2009: 151) argues, qualitative content analysis allows researchers to capture “the key trends and characteristics of the activists’ internet use”. In social movement studies, qualitative content analysis has been used to analyse 250 politically oriented Facebook groups (Marichal, 2012), and to explore whether the internet can serve a public sphere (Salter, 2003). In this study, through a qualitative content analysis of the Facebook postings, I was able to document and analyse the kinds of political discourses circulated by youth activists on the platform. Qualitative content analysis of content posted on Facebook groups and profile pages also helped me to understand the extent to which the platform can be considered an alternative space for political activism.

The sampling frame for qualitative content analysis constituted 1230 Facebook postings (text, images, links and video) archived from the 1st of August 2011 to the 30th of August 2013. A period of two years was also considered a long enough time to get “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973) by observing and documenting youth’s everyday political practices on Facebook. As intimated earlier, I focused on political as opposed to personal Facebook postings. Besides personal postings (include post meant for private consumption), advertisements for products, discussions about topics that had no relevance whatsoever to political issues or events were also excluded from the purposively sampled 3182 posts (see section 5.3.1). I also excluded postings containing redundant remarks and that did not answer the research questions of this study. After I identified political posts (as defined earlier), I proceeded to thematically analyse them in order to identify themes. The chosen postings had very different sizes, some quite short and others very long. As the unit of analysis, I used the format of one post (i.e., wall post, shared post, comment), whether it was posted by the group administrator or by an individual on his/her Facebook group or profile page. Out of a corpus of 3182 posts, 230 posts were purposively chosen because of their information richness and relevance for this study. This is because qualitative content analysts “purposively select text which can inform the research questions being investigated” (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009: 2).

Data was organised into categories or themes in accordance with the research questions, theoretical frame (see Chapter Two) and Hsieh & Shannon’s (2005) conventional and

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directed coding system. According to Hsieh & Shannon (2005), conventional content analysis (or inductive category development application) refers to a system in which coding categories are derived directly and inductively from the raw data. Directed content analysis (or deductive category application) refers to a system in which initial coding starts with a theory or relevant research objectives bringing them in connection with the text (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). In this case, conventional qualitative content analysis enabled me to immerse myself in the data and allow themes to emerge from the data during data analysis process. I took notes during the coding process, writing short descriptions of what each code meant and how it could be used to understand the phenomenon. In deploying conventional qualitative content analysis, I took into cognisance the socio-political and media contexts within which the observations were made.

As indicated in Chapter Two, the notion of “digital hidden transcripts” will be used later in Chapter Seven to document and analyse the kinds of political discourses circulated by youth activists on Facebook groups and profile pages. Building on Hsieh & Shannon’s (2005) directed qualitative content analysis, various genres of digital hidden transcripts as discussed in Chapter Two were deductively categorised and analysed in relation to raw data. Through a constant process of moving back and forth between theory, literature review, and my data, I coded91 raw data on the basis of digital hidden transcripts. Thus Facebook postings were analysed and categorised on the basis of analytical categories identified by Scott (1990) and other scholars (Willems, 2010; 2011; Nyamnjoh, 2005) on popular culture in Africa. These include: political rumour, jokes, cartoons, gossip and online petitions (see Chapter Two). Data was compared with the above codes92 to see if they correspond or if there are any emerging themes. A qualitative content analysis of Facebook postings also served the purpose of preparing me sufficiently for the role of interviewer in individual in-depth interviews. Below I discuss about individual in-depth interviews.