Content Analysis

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Content analysis became a relatively established method of systematic analysis during the 1940s. At first, content analysis was a time-consuming process, executed manually, prone to human error, and subject to serious time and resource constraints. Because of this, the technique was limited to examinations of texts for the frequency of occurrence of identified terms or to short texts, being deemed impractical for more complex investigations, for larger texts, or for most recorded communication other than written texts. By the 1950s, researchers had recognized the need for more sophisticated methods of analysis, and as a result they started to focus on concepts rather than words, and on semantic relationships rather than just the mere presence of certain words.

Since then, content analysis has been extended to almost every type of recorded communication, ranging from books, newspaper articles, historical documents, medical records, Web sites, speeches, and communiqués to theater, television programs, sketches and drawings, informal conversation, writing journals, interviews, classroom discussions, lectures, and manifestos of political parties. As a result, today this research technique is used in fields as varied as marketing and advertising, literature and rhetoric, media studies, ethnography and anthropology, cultural, gender and age studies, sociology, political science, psychology and cognitive science, theology, and religious studies.

Since the 1980s, content analysis has also been widely used in media analysis and media evaluation, often in combination with data on media circulation, frequency of publication, readership, and number of viewers or listeners. During recent decades, various software packages have greatly facilitated the execution of content analysis by allowing researchers to sift systematically through large volumes of data with relative ease, and to make inferences that can then be corroborated by using other methods of data collection and data analysis. Today it is widely recognized that the careful examination of communication patterns can help researchers learn a great deal about individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, and even the larger society in which they are embedded.

Application

Content analysis is possible whenever there is a physical record of communication. This record of communication can be (a) created independently of the research process and internally by the individual or organization under study (as, e.g., newspaper articles, or archived documents detailing household consumption), (b) internally generated and externally directed (e.g., the verbatim transcripts of legislative hearings or committee debates generated by a number of parliaments around the world, which may reflect or obscure the political decision-making process), or (c) produced by the researchers themselves in view of the analysis that needs to be conducted (as, e.g., videotapes of television news programs or commercials, or of debates carried out in the legislature and/or town council). The population of available communications greatly influences the nature of the questions that can be answered through content analysis, as well as the reliability and validity of the final research results.

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