Content Analysis on TV series "The Simpsons"

Content analysis is one of the four methods for interpreting symbols of text and graphics in the mass media that we are using in this assignment: other methods are genre theory, audience analysis and semiotics.

Content analysis is "a systematic and objective method of describing the manifest or surface content of a text" (Grossberg 1998). Because it is involved in defining categories that have had established by the examiner, together with clear definitions that allowing all examiners to count the instances of each category that appear in the text.

The other advantage of content analysis is that "contents are counted" and by counting the hits under categories, the experimenters can hypothesis about the “meaning” of the text.

The Text

The particular television show that I am going to analyze is "The Simpsons". I have chosen "The Simpsons" episode #7G01 (1990) for the basis of my analysis. The story outline for this episode goes like this, "Marge Simpson felt being left out by Homer Simpson, so Marge and Homer hired a baby sitter to take care of the kids, to enable them to have a romantic evening in order to save their marriage. However, the baby sitter turns out to be a national wanted bandit, Bart and Lisa tricked the baby sitter bandit and then tied her up. While Bart and Lisa called for help from a public pay phone, Homer and Marge returned home and Homer untied the bandit and paid her extra money than let her go. After bandit left, Homer accused Bart of not behaving well and then Homer was on national TV for being stupid”.

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Tsung (Michael) Hsieh

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