In the sample of Boyz magazine, one of the initial objectives was to map the development of the ads themselves. How were photos used? How had they come to be used like this? When did they first appear? When did it become usual to use photographs? How are ads used differently for massage and escorting? How representative of the escorting population are the advertisements? It was initially unclear what a meaningful unit of study would be: individual advertisements? Whole pages? Whole sections?
To answer this, I developed a basic Content Analysis of the advertisement section. I began by going through every issue including the dummy issue (a mock up used as a pilot issue, and for selling advertising space to new advertisers) and the first issue. I counted every
advertisement in the ‘Escorts & Masseurs’ column, and noted significant features, such as the magazine’s pricing structures, and changes, such as when they were split into separate
columns. I collected similar data for the surrounding advertisement sections. When I reached theoretical saturation in the approach I was using, for example the number of ads was stable or no new features appeared, I ‘jumped ahead’ to the start of the next year to record the year’s first edition as a representative sample26.
26One criticism of using the first edition is that there are holiday-themed advertisements. The magazine’s director has also noted that a more representative edition might be in June or July, as often advertisers will take breaks over the holiday period. His understanding was that business is slower.
If new features or significant changes were noted in the quantity, content or the layout of the advertisements or the magazine itself, I traced backwards within the year’s editions and tacked backwards and forwards until I located the first instance of change and wrote memos and field notes about the changes. If no new features were recorded, I jumped ahead to the next year’s first edition. This first stage allowed me to make a timeline of the advertisements, and to map the developments and the changes that seemed significant, particularly as read from a contemporary context, where GT (Gay Times), Gaydar, and Grindr seem ubiquitous in (many) gay men’s lives. The findings from this work are discussed in Chapter 5 – Ad Men.
However, from an ethnographic position, I understood that studying Boyz magazine is not wholly representative of the advertising content for men selling sex to men. London is unique in having multiple newsstand and free titles available, each with its own brand and unique selling point (USP). I made additional comparative analysis of a competing free title, QX Magazine, as well as newsstand titles GT (Gay Times) and Attitude. Further analysis could be
done comparing titles in other regions, nationally or internationally.
In the second stage of coding the advertisements, I collected samples of advertisements for analysis. There were significant changes over the 20 years, and I wanted to capture those changes; however, there were over 100 advertisements per issue in most years and 51 or 52 issues per year (see Figure 5.5 in Chapter 5). At the early stages, I was unsure how much detail I needed to collect and how best to record it.
To determine what would be useful to create meaningful categories and develop them to saturation (Charmaz, 2006), I experimented with different sampling methods. I ruled out selecting randomised advertisements across several editions within a year for several reasons.
With advertisements in weekly editions, there is repetition from one edition to the next, and cross-checking content for repetition as I collected randomised ads was inefficient. Within
any one edition, there can be advertisements that use the same phone number. Some advertisers place twinned ads with colleagues or partners as ‘duos’ offering performances, threesomes and group sex. Each edition includes a collection of advertisements that are organised by a series of editorial and layout decisions. Using a randomised selection of advertisements would not allow the advertisements to be read syntagmatically – in the context of their position within surrounding advertisements – and some of these findings would have been missed. Furthermore, creating records of the advertisements presents its own challenges. To make high quality (colour) copies of whole pages, I scanned each page, scanning in two halves where the publication was in the larger A3 format and ‘pasting’ them together in Adobe Photoshop.
My final sample of Boyz content includes the first seven (n=7) consecutive issues in 1991 with a total of 35 unique advertisements, then the first issue of each year (e.g. 01 January) for five years from 1992 to 1996, and thereafter the first January issue of every fifth year (2001, 2006 and 2011), plus additional intermediate issues where significant editorial or format changes occur. See details in Chapter 5. My sample includes the first seven issues in 1991 where escort and massage advertisements appear because so few advertisements appear in each of the earliest issues relative to subsequent years (e.g. n=8 in Boyz August 1, 1991) compared to n=139 in 6 January 1996 and n=154 in 3 February 200127) and many of those ads repeat for several weeks. The additional issues are included to provide a wider sample for the purposes of category saturation.
Having identified the individual ads as the most useful analytic unit to address my research objectives, it was necessary for me to develop my coding schedule further. There are a number of approaches that can be used for specifically evaluating personal ads (Baker, 2003,
27 The format of Boyz magazine changed in 2001 in the 3 February issue. I have analysed and described this issue as my 2001 sample data instead of the first January edition. This highlights one of a number of issues that emerged as causing tension in collecting comparable samples from a dynamic media, even where print media seems relatively static compared to the Internet.
2005) and I adapted additional categories following examples from Baker (2003) and Goldman (1992), as follows:
1. the number of advertisements;
2. whether the advertisements use text only or include a photo;
3. the size of the advertisements, for example: small ads, box ads, ¼ page ads;
4. the inclusion, visibility or description of the model’s face;
5. the inclusion, visibility or description of the model’s body;
6. the use of specific references to price;
7. visible, or references to, race or nationality;
8. references to age;
9. references to particular services or other Unique Selling Points (USP).
I started this stage with the issue from 1996 because it included the broadest range of text formats: verbal, graphic, and photographic texts were available, in different combinations and configurations. I found Item 3 (size of ads) offered little insight that addressed my research question and it was abandoned. Item 7 (visible race or nationality) was problematic for both material and theoretical reasons, which I discuss in Chapter 6. From the remaining seven items, I developed 26 categories, subsequently compared with 23 categories developed in another study which I discuss in Chapter 5 (Phua and Caras, 2008). I compared these categories to the categories that I was constructing from the other texts. Triangulating my findings helped me to focus and support the emerging theory. In the next section, I discuss my procedure for applying codes to texts, and the equipment I used for polytextual analysis of multimodal data.