Content Analysis Flashcards
is the study of analyzing communication messages or objects in a systematic, quantitative manner.
Content Analysis
To research the importance of employment issues in political campaigns, you could analyze campaign speeches for the frequency of terms such as unemployment, jobs, and work and use statistical analysis to find differences over time or between candidates.
Quantitative Content Analysis
To gain a more qualitative understanding of employment issues in political campaigns, you could locate the word unemployment in speeches, identify what other words or phrases appear next to it (such as economy, inequality or laziness), and analyze the meanings of these relationships to better understand the intentions and targets of different campaigns.
Qualitative Content Analysis
Advantages of content analysis
- Unobtrusive data collection
- Transparent and replicable
- Highly flexible
You can analyze communication and
social interaction without the direct involvement of participants, so your presence as a researcher doesn’t influence the results.
Unobtrusive Data Collection
When done well, content analysis
follows a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated by other researchers, yielding results with high reliability.
Transparent and replicable
You can conduct content analysis at any time, in any location, and at low cost – all you need is access to the appropriate sources.
Highly flexible
Disadvantages of content analysis
- Reductive
- Subjective
- Time Intensive
Focusing on words or phrases in isolation can sometimes be overly reductive, disregarding context, nuance, and ambiguous meanings.
Reductive
Content analysis almost always involves some level of subjective interpretation, which can affect the reliability and validity of the results and conclusions, leading to various types of research bias and cognitive bias.
Subjective
Manually coding large volumes of text is extremely time-consuming, and it can be difficult to automate effectively.
Time - Intensive
