Content analysis reliability

• Test re-test

  1. The researcher completes the content analysis by creating a series of coding categories and tallying every time it occurs within the qualitative data.
  2. Same researcher repeats the the content analysis on the same qualitative data eg. interview
  3. Compare the results from each content analysis
  4. Then correlate the results from each content analysis using a stats test
  5. A strong positive correlation of above +0.8 shows high reliability
• Inter-rater reliability

  1. The two raters would read through the qualitative data separately and create coding categories together
  2. Two raters read exactly the same content but tally occurrences separately
  3. They compare the tallies from both raters
  4. Which are then correlated using an appropriate stats test
  5. A strong positive correlation of +0.8 shows high reliability
• Improving reliability -

  Operationalising:

  > Operationalising means to be specific and clear when defining coding categories to make the codes more measurable