content analysis

• an indirect observational method used to analyse human behaviour, investigating through studying human artefacts (the things people make),
• content analysis is often on the written word (non numerical/qualitative data), or write ups of spoken words (transcripts), this is transformed into quantitative data
• to perform a content analysis- decide a research question, select a sample, (eg randomly/systematically) from a larger quantity of all possible data, eg diary entries, tweets, children's books, coding- the researcher decides on categories/coding units to be recorded- (eg occurences of particular words), these are based on the research question, Work through data- read the sample, and tally the number of times the pre-determined categories appear, data analysis- can be perfomed on the quantitative data to look for patterns,
• test-retest reliability- run the content analysis again on the same sample and compare both data sets
• inter-rater reliability- a second rater also performs the content analysis, with the same set of data and the same behavioural categories, compare both data sets
• as the material in a content analysis was not created for research but are taken from the real world it could be argued that it has high external validity, and findings should be generalisable to other real-world situations
• possible negatives of content analysis- possible researcher bias, as the researcher will often need to interpret subjective text, when researchers interpret the text in a way that supports their existing views,
• possible negatives- the data is created for purposes other than the researchers existing views, also as the data is created for reasons outside the purposes of the researcher- therefore not created under controlled conditions meaning it may lack validity