content analysis

• Content analysis

  An indirect observational method that is used to analyse human behaviour through studying artefacts (things people make)
• Content analysis is often in the written word (qualitative data) or write-ups of spoken words(transcripts). This is transformed into quantitative data
• How to perform a content analysis

  1. Decide research question

  2. Select sample(random/systematic)

  3. Decide coding units/ categories e.g. occurrences of particular words

  4. Record the data- read the sample and tally the number of times the categories appear

  5. Data analysis- can be performed on the quantitative data to look for patterns
• Artifacts for content analysis

  • 1950's advertisements
  • Art of the middle ages
  • Films from the late victorian age
  • Greek pots
• Content analysis allows us to give a quantitative description of qualitative human communication
• Coding units/behavioral categories

  Examples of behavior you are recording, linked to your research question and operationalised (defined so they can be precisely measured)
• Waynforth and Dunbar (1995) conducted a content analysis on 881 lonely heart adverts from 4 American newspapers
• Evolutionary theory of mate choice

  • Men look for younger, attractive mates as indicators of fertility
  • Women look for older mates with resources to provide for a family
• The content analysis backed up the evolutionary theory - men looked for significantly younger mates and women significantly older mates, men showed off resources more than women, and women mentioned their own attractiveness more than men
• Conducting a content analysis

  1. Decide measurable categories to record

  2. Tally each time a category appears
• Test-retest reliability


  Running the content analysis again on the same sample on another occasion and comparing the results
• Inter-rater reliability


  Getting a second researcher to complete the content analysis separately using the same operationalised behaviour categories, then comparing the two sets of data
• Researchers generally accept a correlation coefficient of 0.8 between the ratings as showing the data is reliable- correlation is assessed through correlation test
• Strengths of content analysis

  • High external validity as the material was not created for research
  • Easy to get a sample as the data already exists
  • Replication is possible with the same coding units and an easy to access sample
• Weaknesses of content analysis


  • Possibility of observer bias as the researcher often needs to interpret subjective text and could interpret it in a way that supports their pre-existing views
  • Cultural bias – interpretation of verbal or written content will be affected by the language and culture of the observer
• Thematic analysis


  A variation on content analysis where the researcher starts by attempting to discover deeper meanings in the text/interviews, spotting patterns that can be coded, and then identifying themes (emergent themes)
• Thematic analysis is intended to stop the researcher imposing their own ideas on the texts
• Content analysis is a method used to analyse qualitative data (non-numerical data). In its most common form it is a technique that allows a researcher to take qualitative data and to transform it into quantitative data (numerical data)
• Performing a thematic analysis

  1. collect text/turn recordings into text through transcription(writing it down)
  2. read text/transcripts first to spot patterns that can be coded and collected
  3. re-read the transcriptions looking for emergent themes
• in thematic analysis, the themes are not pre-determined by the researcher but come from the data
• thematic analysis strengths


  • theories come after the discovery of themes so thematic analysis may stop the researcher imposing their own bias on the analysis by only looking for what they want to see
  • high external validity
  • easy to replicate
• thematic analysis weaknesses

  • subjective interpretation
  • can be a time-consuming process