No class this week

Remember, we won't be meeting this week. I'll see you again, for Spike Lee's Bamboozled, on Nov. 13.

As you are researching for your final projects and finding your texts for analysis, please email me with questions. If you are doing a qualitatively study, keep the idea of "saturation" in mind. What is saturation? It's when you've reached a kind of fullness of categories or observations. In other words, if you looked at 10 more ads or five more episodes of a sitcom, would you come up with any more "codes" or interpretations of what is going on? Would you add more categories of unique things? Have you already counted or discovered what is there, and adding more won't make your coding scheme or descriptions richer? If the answer to this last question is "yes," then you've reached saturation.

When you've reached saturation, you don't need to keep adding texts for analysis. That means you get to stop and focus on reporting the findings of your study, analyzing what themes or patterns you have found.