Log-file analysis uses the records stored in the transaction logs of information retrieval systems, web search engines, and websites to offer valuable understanding of the interactions between these systems and people. This understanding informs system design, interface development, and information architecture. Log files (or transaction logs) are an unobtrusive and relatively easily method of recording
The basic medium of interpersonal and mass communication is text. Analyzing text helps in understanding the meanings of mass media messages and their potential effects, observing strategies and developments of rhetoric, identifying rules and structures of social communication, etc. Thus text analysis, comprising all kinds of qualitative and quantitative techniques of media content, discourse, and
Time-series analysis is a statistical procedure for describing the characteristics of one time series (e.g., a trend) or predicting the future development of one time series (forecasting), but it can also be used to analyze the impact of an event on a single time series (intervention analysis) and to analyze the correlations between two or
The essence of scientific research is explaining and predicting relationships among variables. Two or more variables co-vary and are related if their values systematically correspond to each other. In other words, as one value increases or decreases, the other value consistently or systematically increases or decreases. For example, researchers might observe the amount of Internet
For many inquiries in the field of communication research, the analysis of change is of great value. Classic diffusion research in the communication sciences deals with the diffusion of information in society, and it is important to know the dynamics of the diffusion process, as well as the factors that influence it. Media research considers
The term “network” denotes a central concept in the social sciences. The underlying idea of a structure that consists of elements (sometimes also called points, nodes, or vertices) and their relations (called lines, edges, arcs, or connections) has been used to illustrate and explain such diverse things as human action, information exchange in communication processes
A class of data analysis procedures for statistical hypothesis testing that, unlike parametric statistical analysis, makes no assumptions about the sampling distribution of a statistic being evaluated, nonparametric statistical analysis is also called distribution-free statistical analysis. The two terms have a slightly different meaning but are frequently used interchangeably. While nonparametric statistical inference is not
By no means all method textbooks discuss document analysis because there is disaccord as to whether this is an independent technique or whether it merely aims to apply different methods to a particular investigation material. There is also controversy as to what has to be understood by “document.” Used in a wider sense as a
Factor analysis is a data analysis procedure that aims at extracting a small number of factors from a large number of items, that is, from variables. The extracted few factors should be able to describe and explain the core characteristics of a phenomenon, without the loss of too much information. Hence, factors show the essence
Introduction Although the US, in comparison with other Western countries, was a latecomer to social insurance and the public provision of insurance for health services, it was largely in the America of the 1960s that formal economic analysis of health care first began to take root, and American ideas and practices have long since dominated