Content analysis

• What is content analysis?


  Technique for systematically summarising and describing any form of content - written, spoken or visual
• Where can content analysis work?


  Unstructured observations, respondent's answers to unstructured interviews or open questions
• What does content analysis involve?


  Creating coding categories and counting how often these categories occur
• Content analysis converts...


  Qualitative data into quantitative data
• Method for content analysis


  1. Decide research question

  2. Decide what will be analysed and collection method

  3. Coding categories

  4. Plot it

  5. Take a sample + tally

  6. Check reliability by correlation research with another's
• Strengths of Content Analysis


  Systematic - large volumes of quantitive data

  Wide use - can be applied to a variety of formats

  Insight into latent content - explore underlying themes and implicit meanings
• Weaknesses of Content Analysis


  Potential for subjectivity and low reliability

  Risk of over simplification

  Loss of context
• Checking reliability


  1. Researchers agree on behaviour categories

  2. Researchers observe/complete the content analysis independently

  3. Researchers return and compare the results

  4. Correlation pro-efficiency of 0.8 for reliability