content and thematic analysis

• explain how you would carry out a content analysis ? 1) watching, listening, reading to whatever your data is 2) identify behavioural categories (relevant to the aim) 3) examples of categories 4)watch/read/listen and count number of examples that fall into each category to produce quantitative data
• explain what is meant by coding?

  -the first stage in content analysis - using behavioural categories -counting how often a particular 'thing'/behaviour/ word appears -turning qualitative data into quantitive
• define content analysis 


  a technique for analysing visual,verbal or written material according to themes or categories (turning qualitive data into quantative)
• is content analysis
• • use recordings to make transcriptions of video/speech
  • use coding to initally analyse transcripts
  • review codes/categories looking for emerget themes that are relevant to ____ (thing being investigated)

  give examples
• strengths of content analysis

  • high ecological validity, based on obervations of what people actually do, real communications, realistic nature of data
  • (minimal ethical issues as data used is usually already available to public domain)
• • limitations of Content analysis/thematic analysis
  • The identification of suitable themes and codes is decided by the researcher alone, relies heavily on the researcher's interpretation of the data, which can introduce bias.
  • just looking at the material can miss contextual details