Qualitative Content Analysis

Qualitative content analysis examines significant aspects of texts that are not amenable to quantitative techniques. Such techniques measure patterns of frequency and regularity in a large number of texts, but as Siegfried Kracauer (1952–1953) once argued in a key paper, what is perhaps most significant about a particular text may resist quantification. Even where this is not the case, some aspects of a text cannot be counted easily, and when they can, this may tell us little of how they operate within or across texts. Examples of textual features and functions resistant, if not allergic, to quantification include irony, ambivalence, and allusion; communicative register and mode of address; folkloric motifs, aesthetic codes, and generic conventions; rhetorical and stylistic devices, including resonant METAPHORS and other figures of speech; and the point of view, presuppositions, and values that may come implicitly with the message and make certain categories or notions appear natural or absolute in meaning.

To take a specific case, certain presuppositions and values may coalesce in shifting a particular category onto the terrain of stereotyping and constructions of the other. Analyzing the construction and operation of a stereotypical figure or conception requires the formulation of a theoretically informed argument as well as the combination of different methodological procedures (see Pickering, 2001).

Qualitative content analysis begins at the point where statistical presentation reaches its limits, and does so in order to reveal the significance of [Page 890]textual features that are latent or hidden in the manifest content or that have consequences beyond their immediate, obstrusive meaning. Even a single lexical choice, such as a headline in a newspaper or a loaded term in a government report, may reverberate throughout the whole text in a series of interactions with other components of the text, and a particular text may set off a chain of development and response that escapes its reference in a quantified pattern of frequency. For Kracauer, such qualities of a text create its texture of intimations and implications.

Two of the most important qualitative approaches to the study of media content and cultural texts have been semiotics and critical discourse analysis (see Deacon, Pickering, Golding, & Murdock, 1999, Chaps. 7 and 8). Both approaches offer various conceptual tools that can be used in unpicking textures of intimation and implication in a document or artifact, showing how they have broader ramifications within the cultural formations in which they are produced and disseminated. Both also show how particular significations and representations are multiaccented or intersected by different currents of meaning and value. Such forms of qualitative content analysis do not treat cultural texts as isolated entities but as sites of interaction between processes of production and processes of interpretation. As such, they bear the definite imprint of their production but are never fixed in their meaning. They provide cues for their interpretation but are open to multiple readings. Qualitative modes of analysis are best for tracking the perspectives from which cultural texts start and the directions to which they lead as they are constructed and reconstructed, and so come to mean what they always provisionally mean, even as they may seem to insist on a fixed, or singular, legitimate interpretation.

...