When it comes to data collection, I looked at twenty-five United States high school history textbooks between the years 1950 and 2020. I looked at the following events: Christopher Columbus coming to the Americas, Slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the Trail of Tears/American Indian Removal Act, and Japanese-American Internment Camps during World War II. Through these, I looked at the images, language, and events spoken about in the textbooks. I used basic content analysis to look through my twenty-five sources. With coding, I drew out key repetitive themes that are present. I noted words that are used repeatedly and how many times they are used. This is an example of a time that I used quantitative analysis. Although since I am looking at text a majority of my work was done with qualitative analysis. Drisko and Maschi (2015) describe how qualitative content analysis is used, “for the systematic analysis of texts of many kinds, addressing not only manifest content but also the themes and core ideas found in texts as primary content” (82). By using this technique I was able to draw out the core themes and ideas from the specific text that I choose to analyze within the United States high school history textbooks. A mix of both quantitative and qualitative content analysis will be best for my study with an emphasis on the qualitative analysis part to get the most thorough analysis of my text.

The sampling method that I used is nonprobability sampling specifically convenience sampling based on the high school history textbooks that I was able to get access to. I found history textbooks evenly spread between the years 1950 and 2020. Originally, this would mean finding a book about every three years. Unfortunately, I was not able to find that, and instead, I tried to find at least two textbooks from each decade. This allowed me to see how race was spoken about before and after the Civil Rights Movement. I also looked for events that happen in the past and begin being implemented after the Civil Rights Movement. I found these textbooks through archive.org. In the end, I was able to analyze how the idea of race is spoken about and presented throughout time in high school history textbooks.

Using quantitative content analysis I coded for certain keywords. For each event, I choose around twenty words and went through each of the textbooks, and counted the number of times the words were used. Through this, I was looking to see how the use of the word changed. Using qualitative content analysis I coded for quotes, pictures, and the number of pages used for each section. I looked for negative quotes and positive quotes in relation to race. Along with these quotes I also looked for pictures that depicted minority groups both in a negative and positive way. By looking at the page numbers I noticed how the number of pages with certain events decreased while others increased.