Content analysis

• Content analysis is changing qualitative data into quantitative data it is a research tool to indirectly analyse human behavior
• Content analysis is usually carried out on secondary data
• To perform content analysis

  1. Decide research question
  2. Select sample ( random/ systematic
  3. Decide categories to be recorded eg occurrence of a particular word
  4. Work through data read the sample and tally number of times the pre determined categories appear
  5. Data analysis can be performed on quantitative data to look for patterns

  Coding units / categories should be operationalized clearly defining the behaviour to reduce subjective interpretation
• Lonely hearts 


  Researchers were interested in mate choices and how they match the evolutionary theory

  • Evolutionary theory both men and women want to have children to pass on their genes
  • Because male and females have different biology we have different reproductive strategies
  • Males look for younger and attractive mates as indication of fertility
  • Women look for older mates because men are fertile for longer and also look for men with resources (house/job/money) men have more resources as they age
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  Lonely hearts procedure

  881 lonely hearts adverts were taken from 4 newspapers in America

  • The ages were recorded
  • Coding frames for physical attractiveness included terms like athletic , attractive, cute , fit , goodlooking , nice body , handsome , buxom

  Qualitative data was turned into quantitative data by tallying
• it backed up the evolutionary theory as they found men looked for young women Females looked for older mates Men showed off their resources more than women Women asked for resources more than men Women mentioned their own attractiveness more than men and men asked for attractive partners than women THIS SHOWS THAT THE LARGE SET OF QUALITATIVE DATA CAN BE TURNED INTO QUANTITATIVE DATA AND PROVIDE EVIDENCE TO A RESEARCH QUESTION
• Conducting a content analysis

  1. Decide on measurable categories to record linked to content collected
  2. Read samples and tally the number of times the category appears
• Testing for reliability ( consistency) of content analysis

  Test retest - involves doing the content analysis again on the same sample and compare the 2 sets of data

  Inter rater reliability - 2 researchers conducting the same content analysis separately and using the same categories to tally then compare the 2 sets of data

  Both these involve looking at correlation between two sets of data when testing a correlation researchers will accept a correlation coefficient of 0.8 to show the data is RELIABLE
• Evaluation


  Advantages-

  • Material are real artifacts created by real people therefore have high external validity as they are not created for research therefore findings can be generalised to other real world settings
  • As artifacts come from the real world it is easy to gather a sample
  • Other researchers should be able to replicate content analysis using the same coding units \ behavioural categories
• Disadvantages


  • Researcher would need to interpret subjective text this may lead to researcher observer bias where researchers tend to interpret the text in a way that supports their pre existing views
  • Lacks validity as the data is collected for other purposes other than the research as the data was not collected under controlled conditions
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  Thematic analysis - variation of content analysis where researcher identifies themes in the research to stop bias