Content Analysis

Question 1

Content analysis

What is it A01

Answer 1

• It investigates the meanings and messages in a variety of forms of communication
• Analyses speech in interviews, media sources such as TV, magazines, web pages and books
• It allows you to turn qualitative data into quantitative data
• Aim is to look for themes, categories or behaviours depending on the purpose of the study
• Behaviours or examples of the categories are then counted-tallying
• Chosen for its practicality, sensitivity of subject, if something is a one off event or it is hard to find an appropriate sample

Question 2

Content analysis

Types A01 (1)

Answer 2

Frequency analysis- the number of times certain words come up (eg number of times sexual references come up in day-time television)
-Pick categories=eg female body parts
-Count frequency of occurrence for each category
Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPS)
-Read transcript several times
-Identify emergent themes
-Order and organise themes into clusters
-Which can become higher order themes and tallied to produce quantitative data

Question 3

Content analysis

Types A01 (2)

Answer 3

Summarise content analysis

• Involves tallying frequency of keywords or content which forms the quantitative element of the method. If the analysis stopped at this point the analysis would be quantitative (manifest content- surface data)
• Define categories/code= starts with identifying certain key words or content in the sources. You can either decide on what the keywords are going to be prior/Or during the analysis
• When generated prior to the analysis these are derived by the researcher in terms of their interests, or based on a review of the literature
• Followed by the interpretation of the underlying context- which provides a qualitative element of providing some of the rich detail qualitative data provides (latent content- what do the numbers mean)