Research Note: Sample size in content analysis of advertising: the case of Chilean consumer magazines

In the absence of studies addressing how to sample advertising in content analysis in a reliable manner, this paper aims to determine the most efficient way to select from a year’s worth of issues for conducting content analysis of advertising in terms of sample size and type.

Research Note: Sample size in content analysis of advertising: the case of Chilean consumer magazines

Rodrigo Uribe and Enrique Manzur

Universidad de Chile

Introduction

In the field of marketing communication studies, one of the key areas of research is message content analysis. A recurrent problem among scholars is determining the best way to sample advertisements and the exact numbers of units required to make precise inferences about the content of these pieces of communication. In practice, this has resulted in a wide variety of samples sizes and strategies across studies (Stempel 1952; Riffe et al. 1998; Neuendorf...

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