Introduction

Consider the rich diversity of focus of the following studies, all of them examples of quantitative content analysis across a five-decade period:

• In the late 1940s, researchers examined change in the international political system by looking at 60 years of editorials in five prestige world newspapers. Lasswell et al. found two concurrent trends in the editorials' language-reflecting increasing nationalism and growth of proletarian doctrines-that seemed to support their hypothesis that international social revolution had been brewing for some time (Lasswell, Lerner, & de sola Pool, 1952).