Content Analysis

• Types of Content Analysis

  Qualitative to quantitative

  1. Concordance analysis: number of times certain phrases come up

  2. Frequency analysis: number of times certain words/themes come up

  - pick categories

  - count frequency of occurrence for each category
• Thematic analysis


  1. read transcript several times

  2. identify emergent themes

  3. order and organise themes into clusters

  4. table of themes (operationalised coding units)
• differences between frequency/concordance analysis and thematic analysis?

  thematic analysis -> themes that crop up are more likely to be more descriptive than coding units described previously

  - data tend to be qualitative still
• content analysis


  statistical process that involves categorising and quantifying events/aspects of behaviour as they occur in a selected medium

  involves converting content into some kind of objective, operationalised measure, one of first considerations is to decide on a relevant coding system
• content analysis definition


  method by which you take qualitative data and analyse it in order to draw conclusions
• how to do a content analysis

  1. read through initial extract

  2. re-read placing out key themes mentioned in the text

  3. create a table of operationalised coding units

  4. re-read extract and tally the amount of time the themes appear
• Strengths


  - great to study emotions + motivation

  - can be used to study behaviour which would be unethical to manipulate in a lab setting
• Weaknesses


  - not scientific -> can't infer cause + effect

  - can't really generalise findings as it's one person(s) small groups view - lacks population validity

  reliability - interpretation of views/data

  - lacks inter-rate reliability

  validity - ambiguous language, misinterpretation