1. Evidence in Practice
This is a coursework style assessment, that will be formally assessed during your exam.
The specification requires that you:
Describe one key issue in health psychology, using the content YOU have studied within the application and conduct a content analysis concerning this key issue.
the issue of How to Prevent drug abuse

2. Learning objectives
To learn about what content analysis means and why it is used.
To investigate how to carry out a content analysis.
To look at how a content analysis may be summarised and conclusions drawn.
To look at the issues associated with doing a content analysis.

3. What is content analysis?
Content analysis is a research method used to measure the number of times a behaviour or event occurs within one or several forms of media (or other artefacts).
The process is similar to that of an observation although is indirect as you are not observing people directly.
e.g. songs, TV, books, magazines, computer games, newspapers etc

4. These behavioural categories might be:
What happens in a content analysis?
Sample: a content analysis is different from other research methods in that the sample is not a group of people. The sample will be the artefacts that are to be analysed. This needs to be representative. For example, if looking at gender stereotypes in car adverts that appear in magazines, you would need a wide range of different magazines to get a representative sample. If you only used men’s magazines, your sample would be biased, and you may not be able to generalise your results.
Coding System: Similarly to an observation, the researcher has to create a coding system, which breaks down the information into categories. So for the example above, for each advert, you may first identify the gender of person in the car advert, and then tally what they are depicted doing.
These behavioural categories might be:
Driving the car
Passenger in the car
Washing the car
Loading up the boot
Sitting on the bonnet
Looking at the car
Etc.....

5. The researcher would then tally each time a particular behaviour is included in the artefact. This is called a quantitative analysis.
Categories of strategies used to Prevent Drug Use
Tallies
Biological effects on ones self
Social effects (society)
Effects on families / Relationships
Emotional Effects

6. An alternative to having a coding system like above is to do a qualitative analysis.
This is where the researcher has categories and chooses a particular example to illustrate this category.
So for the category “Biological effects” they might describe a particular lyric, sentence or picture as a demonstration.
Instead of counting the data, it is described (hence qualitative rather than quantitative).

7. Results: the researcher then looks at the data he has collected, and draws conclusions.
For example, you may find that government backed campaigns to prevent drug abuse uses more instances of biological effects of drug taking, compared to a non-government backed campaign (i.e. in a soap opera or song)
You may therefore conclude from this that there a need to accommodate the awareness of the biological effects of drugs in non-government backed anti-drugs strategies, in order to make them more effective.
You will need to justify your answers here using concepts, theories and studies from the Health Psychology and AS Units.

8. Strengths and weaknesses of content analysis
High ecological validity
No chance of demand characteristics.
Replicable
Reliability can also be assessed using inter-observer reliability
Observer bias
Culture bias (Ethnocentric)
We cannot draw cause and effect relationships

9. Conducting content analysis
You would need to:
Make a list of any factors that can be used to help to prevent drug use (these should come from AS and Health Psychology).
From this list of drug prevention concepts you need to outline them in categories that could be measured as preventative. i.e. What categories will be on your list?
Decide on the sample you need to study (e.g. a representative sample which will allow you to discuss your key issue). One example will be provided for you, the other you will need to source yourself. What sampling decisions do you have to consider?

10. Conducting a content analysis
5) Briefly describe your sources and how you sourced them. Remember to make this a fair test.
6) Tally (count) the number of drug taking behaviours that were mentioned.
7) Draw a visual representation of Quantitative sampling.
8) Write up any qualitative elements sampled.
9) Write up your findings and conclude. Remember that you will need to justify your answers here using concepts, theories and studies from the Health Psychology and AS Units.