Content analysis

Question 1

what is content analysis

Answer 1

type of observational research - people are studied indirectly using communications they have produced

communication forms : are wide ranging and can include spoken interaction (conversation/ speech etc), written forms (texts and emails etc) or broader examples from media - films, books, TV, magazines

Question 2

what is the aim of content analysis

Answer 2

to summarise and describe this communication in a systematic way so overall conclusions can be drawn

Question 3

what is coding?

Answer 3

coding is the initial stage of content analysis - some data sets to be analysed are very very large so information is categorised into meaningful categories.

this could involve the number of times a word appears in text - this is to produce quantitative data

Question 4

what is thematic analysis?

Answer 4

a form of content analysis but the outcome is qualitative

main process involves identifying the themes - referring to any idea - explicit or implicit that is recurrent

likely to be more descriptive that the coding units

once the researcher is happy that the themes cover most of the aspects of the data they are analysing - they may collect a new set of data to test the validity of themes and categories.

then the researcher will write up the final report - typically using direct quotes from the data to show each theme

Question 5

strength of content analysis

Answer 5

it is useful as it can circumnavigate many ethical issued that are usually associated with psychological research

this is because a lot of the data used is from public domain (films, Tv etc)

so there are no issues regarding permission - also the communications have high external validity

also it is flexible because content analysis can produce qualitative and quantitate data depending on the aims of research

Question 6

limitations of content analysis

Answer 6

people tend to be studied indirectly so the communications produces are analysed outside of the context which it occurred in

there’s a danger that the researcher may attribute their own opinions and motivations to the speaker / writer that were not intended originally

• although most modern analysts are clear about their own biases influence the research process

BUT - content analysis may still suffer from a lack of objectivity, especially when more descriptive forms of thematic analysis are employed