I had a seminar class today with my Communication Studies 4N03: News Analysis class. It was great. We focused on units of sampling, variable selection and defining the population. I really enjoy teaching this class, because it is problem- and project-based. The class is divided into 7 groups, each of whom is taking on a specific news analysis challenge. Some are looking at digg.com, some are examining the tonality of Olympic coverage in leading Canadian and American newspapers, others are examining colour schemes on popular news websites, others are looking into equally fascinating research challenges. All of the projects are fascinating and should yield relevant results. I spent most of the class making the distinction between three often confusing elements of a content analysis research design: the units of sampling, data collection and analysis. Then we talked about different sampling techniques. Unitization and sampling are often the pitfalls in content analysis research design and have to be very well thought-through. We went around the class and worked out the units for each study. I left the three-hour class confident that they got it.