Assessing afrocentrism: An afrocentric approach to content analysis.

摘要

A procedure to assess and evaluate Afrocentric content is introduced as an aid to better understand the salient themes expressed in the speeches of effective African American leaders. After being asked to categorize Afrocentric content into six distinct content categories, 10 recognized expert scholars in the field of Afrocentric psychology validated only one holistic category. Twenty students of African American culture were then asked to code 20 speech excerpts for holistic Afrocentric content. Using sentences as the unit of analysis, student participants read the same speech excerpts as an expert Afrocentric psychologist and a comparison of their agreement with the expert on all speeches was computed.;There was high agreement among the student participants with the expert coder on speeches by Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, A. Philip Randolph, John Hurst Adams, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Colin Powell's Howard University speech. The speeches with the highest level of agreement all had themes related to cultural and ethnic solidarity and contained appeals for collective consciousness, collective identity, and collective action.;There was low agreement with the expert coder on speeches by David DuBois, Marian W. Edelman, Martin Luther King, and Louis Farrakhan.;While student participants agreed with the expert in identifying some of the Afrocentric content, there was a high level of disagreement with student coders selecting a significant number of other sentences that the expert Afrocentric psychologist did not agree were Afrocentric.;Four additional Afrocentric psychologists validated the identification of Afrocentric content by reading four of the same speech excerpts as the expert coder. The results showed high agreement with the original expert coder indicating that Afrocentric themes can be identified in the speeches of race leaders if the coders have an extensive and thorough understanding of the intricacies of Afrocentric Theory.