ABSTRACT
This chapter narrates my early experiences in content analyzing violence on U.S. television. This was a politically and culturally controversial issue with competing interest groups claiming to speak authoritatively of its presences and effects. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Office commissioned the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication to provide data about its prevalence and role. Because our results were to be part of congressional hearings and likely to be questioned by opponents, we had to make sure that our findings were reliable. Methods and measures to demonstrate the reliability of our findings were inadequate or unknown to us, so we had to invent them. This chapter describes several lessons learned in the process of exploring alternative reliability measures, developing unquestionable coding instructions, and standardizing the training of coders.
The chapter concludes with a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book.
