Content AnalysisBy Anders Hansen

Module Five: Unit 28

Content analysis, though by no means the only method for studying communication content, is perhaps the only one that is most quantitative

What distinguishes content analysis from others is that it consists of a set of clearly articulated steps and it lends itself to summarizing trends from a large body of communication content

What then is content analysis?

“Content analysis is a research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”

“Content analysis is any technique for making inferences by systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages”

“Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context”

Simply, content analysis is a research technique in which the manifest content is quantitatively analyzed in print and broadcast media. Manifest content meaning the content in its denotative rather than connotative meaning

The aim of content analysis is to examine how news, drama, advertising, and entertainment content of mass media reflect social and cultural issues, values and phenomena

Content analysis is well suited to being combined with other research techniques such as survey, participant observation and audience ethnography

Content analysis is by definition a quantitative method

The purpose of the method is to identify and count the occurrence of specified characteristics or dimensions of texts and through this to be able to say something about the messages, images, representations of such texts and their wider social significance

In context analysis, the key idea is frequency with which symbols or themes appear in text

The problem however is that the relationship between the frequency of occurrence in text or the way it is represented or portrayed and its wider social impact is far more complex than can be deduced from content analysis

What needs to be questioned is not the counting and quantifying as such but the meaning or interpretation which is attached to findings in content analysis

Critics of content analysis have argued it is not the significance of frequency that is important but the repetition of significance as there can be little disagreement that counting the insignificant has little purpose

Critics also argue that in counting individual units and their frequency of occurrence, content analysis fails to capture the way in which meaning arises from the complex interaction of symbols in texts as is possible in semiotics

It is argued that much of the criticism which has been directed at content analysis touches on problems more to do with potential and actual mis-uses and abuses of the method

Good content analysis seldom involve meaningless counting or quantification, rather it involves analysis of specified dimensions and relationships between these dimensions

Define the research problem Select media and sample: select media or titles

and sample issues, editions or dates & sample relevant content

Define analytical categories: actors/sources or subjects/themes/issues or vocabulary/lexical choice or value-dimensions/stance such as positive/negative/ neutral

Construct a coding schedule Pilot the coding schedule and check reliability Data-preparation and analysis

Doing Content Analysis: Key Steps

The conceptually most taxing aspect of any content analysis is to define the dimensions or characteristics which should be analyzed

The text characteristics which are singled out for analysis should relate directly to the overall research questions or problems or hypotheses guiding the research