Research proposal

The research methodology that will be used is quantitative to investigate whether top

songs on the Billboard charts use vulgar and degrading language. Then, Billboard magazine will

be used for identifying top popular songs for the past ten years. Also, using ARTISTdirect and

Amazon websites will help to get the track listing. Also, since there are many albums with vulgar

and degrading language using random.org will be essential to generate 100 billboard songs

randomly. The reason is that there are albums that contain repeating songs so filtering them will

be necessary. Moreover, the billboard airplay uses Nielsen Broadcast Data System which makes

it important to use the top 100 listed songs. Also, the rating of the songs would be important to

understand whether the songs have vulgar and degrading language on the type of songs and the

language used by the artist.

Two independent coders were used to analyze all the 100 songs for degrading and vulgar

and non-degrading. The two trained coders will independently analyze the printed lyrics of every

song for issues of rude and degrading languages. However, the codes will be assigned according

to the nature of the lyrics. With the use of Cohen’s Kappa scores measures, inter-rater of

degrading and non-vulgar languages in songs will be considerable. The Cohen’s kappa statistic

will be computed in rating the essence of the vulgar and degrading language of the coded songs

in measuring and judging the values of the use of language through Landis and Koch framework.

The framework will help to assign kappa values in the moderate agreement on vulgar and

degrading language and substantial agreement on the progressing use of the abusive terms on the

songs.