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Content Analysis and Classical Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

T. F. Carney
T. F. Carney
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
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Extract

Mr Bloch's note contained other surprises for me beside that of discovering that I'd been in the Political Science Department of M.I.T. There does seem to be a real issue, however—propriety of use of a technique like content analysis—so reply seems indicated, unaccustomed as I am to this form of public speaking.

Firstly, logic. My reference to content analysis was specifically limited to Mr Stadter's chapter four (third paragraph of my review). Mr Bloch generalises this, apparently (see his paragraph one), to refer to the whole review—certainly he does not deal specifically with my criticisms in paragraph two, though they involve specific, substantive points. My paragraph two dealt with semantics, a separate, if related, issue. Let's not muddle them up here. Some inconsistency seems involved in arguing that ‘content analysis has nothing to contribute’ (Mr Bloch's paragraph three) while yet ‘students of literature and historians have for generations pursued “content analysis” as a major aim of their professions' (paragraph four). I note also that Mr Bloch was able to define the use of content analysis as ‘inappropriate’ even when it was ‘a term he had never previously encountered’ (paragraph two).

Information

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 88 , November 1968, pp. 137 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1968

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References

1 Pace Mr Bloch (paragraph four), not a ‘discipline’—an analytical tool used in many disciplines: P. J. Stone & Co., The General Inquirer (M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass., 1966) 44–60.Google Scholar

2 Though I don't pretend to MrBloch, 's greater scholarly experience: cf. e.g. HSCP, lxii (1957) 37 ff.Google Scholar

3 ‘Chief’ by consensus of the recent National Conference on Content Analysis, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, November 16–18.

4 Stone, 23 and 30.

5 ‘Partial’ because Mr Bloch chooses to take from Pool only the concluding summary (radier than to illustrate from the somewhat more germane chapter ‘The Application of Content Analysis to Biography and History’, by J. A. Garraty [171–87]).

6 Cited because it's easier to come by than Berelson's Content Analysis.

7 Mr Bloch (paragraph four) cites a ‘typical’ instance of non-sociological content analysis. In view of his bibliography in this field, it would be helpful to know how he arrived at this assessment.

8 See Mazlish, B. (ed.), Psychoanalysis and History (Prentice-Hall, N.J., 1963) 3Google Scholar; Barbu, Z., Problems of Historical Personality (Grove Press, N.Y., 1960)Google Scholar (chapter on the Greeks) and Hagen, E. E., On the Theory of Social Change (Dorsey, Illinois, 1962) 55–98.Google Scholar

9 Rhetorically: are we to take it that an historian ought not to concern himself with the social sciences?