Content analysis - Definition and Overview

Content analysis (also called: "textual analysis") is a standard methodology in the social sciences on the subject of communication content and can be applied in quantitative and qualitative ways. Quantitatively it starts with word counts, space measurements (column centimeters in the case of newspapers), time counts (for radio and television time) etc. Qualitatively it can involve any kind of analysis where communication content (speech, written text, interviews ...) is categorized and classified. A common variant of content analysis is stereotyping studies. While on its start with the first newspapers at the end of 19th century, it was done by manually measuring the amount of lines and space e.g. on newspapers. With the rise of common computing facilities like PCs, computer based methods are also popular in content analysis. Answers to open ended questions, newspaper articles, political party manifestoes, medical records or systematic observations in experiments are objects to textual analysis. By having contents of communication (from the mass media but also from personal communications) available as machine readable texts, they are taken as input and counted for word frequencies. The next step is to distinguish between dictionary-based approaches and others. Dictionary-based approaches generate a list of categories from the frequency list and control the distribution of categories over the texts. While methods in quantitative content analysis in this way transforms observations of found categories into quantitative statistical analysis, the qualitative content analysis focuses on the intentional meanings of communication content.

Literature

• Bernard Berelson: Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe, Il: Free Press 1952
• Klaus Krippendorf: Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2004 (currently the most important book available)

• Carl W. Roberts (ed.): Text Analysis for the Social Sciences: Methods for Drawing Inferences from Texts and Transcripts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum 1997

• Robert Philip Weber: Basic Content Analysis. 2nd ed., Newbury Park, CA: Sage 1990 (recommended reading for starters)

• on the Web: http://www.car.ua.edu/ (offers a fairly complete reading list, a long list of available software solutions and mailing list)

for more detailed information, check [1] (http://writing.colostate.edu/references/research/content/)