ABSTRACT
Today, textbooks on research in communication and the social sciences typically devote a chapter to ethics (see, for example, Frey, Botan, & Kreps, 2000; Hocking, Stacks, & McDermott, 2003; Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). These chapters discuss the key elements or principles of ethical research, including risks and benefits, voluntary participation, informed consent, deception and concealment, debriefing, and ethics in data gathering, analysis, reporting, and manuscript preparation. They typically examine ethics from the perspective of studies that use the participant or recipient as the unit of analysis. Surveys and experiments, for example, are designed to isolate differences between groups of respondents or between different treatment groups. The unit of analysis in these studies is the individual. Content analysis, on the other hand, is based on a research perspective in which the units of analysis are elements of message content: television programs, newspaper articles, music videos, advertisements, commercials, and the like. Consequently, ethics in content analyses must be considered from a very different perspective, one that in the past was not usually addressed. Interestingly, none of the three key texts used by content analytic researchers or in courses teaching content analysis techniques (Krippendorff, 1980, 2004; Neuendorf, 2002; Riffe, Lacy, & Fico, 1998) mentions specific or special ethical concerns in content analysis.
