Case studies and content analysis

• What is content analysis?

  • The indirect study of behaviour by examining communications that people produce (e.g. Tv, texts, emails, diaries)
  • Method that quantifies qualitative data through coding units
• What is thematic analysis?

  • Identifying implicit or explicit ideas within data
  • Qualitative method for reporting themes and patterns within data
  • Themes will emerge once data has been coded
• What is coding?

  • The stage in content analysis in which categories are identified are chosen from information studied
• What is a case study?

  • An in-depth investigation description and analysis of a single individual, group, institution or event
• Limitations of content analysis?

  • Indirect study may result in the analysis of behaviour/content outside of the context it occurred in
  • researchers may infer/derive opinions and motivations from the study that were not intended originally, therefore a misunderstanding of the content studied
  • Overall, may limit understanding and explanatory ability, we may need to look from a wider context to understand instead of an indirect analysis
• Strength of content analysis? (AO3)

  • Less of an issue with ethics as material chosen to study is usually in the public domain for anyone to access
  • Flexible as it produces both quantitative and qualitative data depending on aims
  • High external validity
• Strength of case studies? (AO3)

  • Qualitative data, rich and detailed insights which may shed more informational light on atypical forms of behaviour
• Limitations of case studies? (AO3)

  • Limited generalisability and ecological validity
  • Cases tend to be unique to the person of study and therefore cannot form general conclusions of behaviours
  • Report is subjective to the researcher and their interpretations
  • Case study insights into childhood may be subjective to inaccuracy, exaggeration/minimalisation and memory decay
• What are units?

  • Units include: words, themes, characters, time and space
  • Units are coded in content analysis to categorise analysed material
  • E.g. amount of times a word is used
• How does content analysis work?

  • the researcher reads through material to identify potential categories which emerged from the data
  • Researcher may establish categories using coding units
  • the researcher would then have read the diaries again and using coding units counted the number of examples which fell into each category to provide quantitative data
  • Make inferences about data
• 6 stages in thematic analysis?

  • Familiarisation with data, reading it
  • Coding, generating codes (labels) that identify themes/features of data
  • Searching for themes, examining codes and data to identify patterns of meaning
  • Reviewing themes, see if themes can be applied to data, refines them
  • Defining and naming themes
  • Writing up, combining information gained from analysis and identified themes
• How to asses the reliability of content analysis?

  • Inter-rater where second person could (independently) perform a content analysis on the same media
  • Test-rests where repeat content analysis on a second occasion using the same media
  • use the existing categories that have been established
  • compare their tally charts looking for agreement/calculate the correlation between the two sets of data
  • researchers generally accept 0.8 correlation (accept 0.7–0.9) between the two sets of data
• How to assess the reliability of thematic analysis?


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