Content Analysis
Table of contents
You can use content analysis as a research method for analyzing patterns in any type of written, visual, oral, or other recorded communication. It helps collect data from any set of texts, such as newspapers, magazines, books, interviews, speeches, social media posts, web content, films, or photographs.
Content analysis has types - quantitative and qualitative.
- The quantitative content analysis deals with measuring and counting.
- The qualitative analysis is about understanding and interpreting.
Both types require categorization or coding concepts, words, or themes. You analyze the results of such coding.
How to Use Content Analysis?
Content analysis is a common research method used to learn the effects, purposes, and messages of any communicative means. You can also conclude about the authors and audiences of the content. Content analysis is also helpful when you need to calculate the frequency of specific words, concepts, or subjects in historical or present-day discourse.
Example of Quantitative Analysis
To investigate the role of tax increase effects in electoral campaigns, researchers can analyze the promotional speeches of the candidates and detect the frequency of such concepts as “increase,” “decrease,” “regulations,” cutting down,” etc. Then, statistical analysis helps to see the differences and regularities within certain periods of electoral activities of different candidates.
Content analysis is also applied to making qualitative research on the semantic meanings of certain concepts.
Example of Qualitative Analysis
To evaluate the importance of increase and decrease in taxes and the use of these concepts in electoral campaigns, you can look for the words “increase” and “decrease” in candidates’ speeches, research what other words refer to these concepts and are used alongside these main ones (for instance, “problem,” “inequality,” “poverty,” etc.), and produce the analysis of their mutual relations to infer the targets and objectives of political campaigns of individual candidates.
Purposes and Goals of Content Analysis
Content analysis is universal because, due to its possible application to a wide range of recorded material, it is used in different fields, like social science, anthropology, psychology, marketing, business analysis, media studies, etc.
Using it in these fields has various goals and purposes. They are the following:
- research of the intentions of a specific individual, group, or organization
- detection of communicative varieties in different contexts
- search for the set patterns and correlations in communication
- analysis of possible bias or propaganda
- look at the communication consequences, audience responses, or the informational flow
| ✔️ unbiased collection of data, meaning that you analyze social interaction without involving the participants, as in the case of experiments, so their views or the researcher’s presence cannot affect the outcomes | ❌ limitations are essential because if you focus on some concepts in isolation, the approach is pretty reductive because it does not take into account their context, nuances, and additional meanings |
| ✔️ replicable and transparent results because of a systematic procedure of the analysis that can be easily repeated by other investigators and produce reliable results | ❌ subjective interpretations may occur, and it can influence the validity or reliability of the research results and conclusions you have made, and it can lead to different types of cognitive and research bias |
| ✔️ increased flexibility accounting for the concentration on specific words and phrases that are isolated from others (though it may sometimes seem too limiting without the context and due to certain nuances and unclear meaning) | ❌ they are mostly time-consuming because you have to manually code the large texts, and they cannot be processed automatically |
Methodology of Content Analysis
Here is how to use content analysis in any research. You have to begin by formulating a clear and well-structured research question.
“What is the difference between representing the veterans of rock’n’roll and new talents in social mass media in terms of their contribution to this field of music?”
Then, you can do the following steps for performing your content analysis.
1. Pick out the content for the analysis.
The content should be based on your research question, so you need to consider the following:
- the types of media (e.g., websites, magazines, promotional ads) and the genre (e.g., critical analysis, blog posts, marketing copies, etc.)
- the criteria for exclusion and inclusion (e.g., blog posts that mention the artists’ specific contribution, magazine articles by prominent experts, and ads promoting either old or new bands)
- the specific parameters related to the time and date, place in the world, the field of performance, etc.
If you cannot find many texts that can correspond to these criteria, you need to choose all the possible texts related to the research question that you have managed to find. If you have picked out a lot, start with selecting a sample.
You may also need to look into the media representation of older and younger musicians, so try to equally analyze the latest publications and those released in the previous decade or so. For instance, if the bulk of all the publications is rather massive, give priority to several names of mass media and their publications on Mondays only.
2. Decide on the parts (units) and categories for your analysis.
The next step means determining the level at which the texts you have picked out should be analyzed. So, you have to define:
- the meaningful units you need to code, for example, the frequency of separate words characterizing the music and the people who use them most often, the images that illustrate the thoughts and presentations, and the approaches the critics and promoters use to put forward their concepts;
- the most important categories you want to use for codings, such as the objective characteristics of singers and critics, their age and expertise, or more attributive ones, such as creative, brand-new, unique, technological, etc.
The units chosen for this analysis are the rock musicians who are mentioned in every article and the vocabulary and phrases used to characterize them. Your research question implies that you will be categorizing them based on their age, the uniqueness of their talent, and their contribution to the genre. If you want to receive even more detailed data, add coding for some other categories, for example, the themes of their tracks or the individual vision of the problem tacked in their compositions.
3. Create a set of coding rules and instructions.
Coding the data means getting all the units organized into clear and straightforward categories. That is why it is important to develop rules regulating what to include and what to skip while coding to know that all the texts are coded in the same way. It is especially important when the team of researchers does the investigation, and everyone in it needs to know what to pay attention to. Or you may be coding on your own but having a set of rules helps you to make your method more consistent and reliable.
If you are coding the category of “new rock artists,” you may want to code their specializations (guitarist, soloist, drummer, etc.). If you take “uniqueness,” be ready to pick the specific phrases related to it (such as surprising, authentic, or original).
4. Start coding due to the developed rules and instructions.
Look through every text and pick out all the data that correspond to certain categories. You can do it by hand or with the help of specific software, like QSR NVivo, Diction, or Atlas. TI. Using these computer programs will help you save time and effort and speed up the categorizing and coding process.
Due to the settled coding rules, you check every article or text in your sample and record the characteristics of each musician or band mentioned in them as well as all the words that refer to the uniqueness and are often used to describe it.
5. Make the analysis of the results and conclude about the outcomes.
After you have completed coding, examine the collected and categorized data to detect the specific patterns and make conclusions related to your research question. You can use statistical analysis to distinguish trends or correlations and interpret the meaning of the obtained results to choose the main characteristics of the artists, authors of the texts, specific audiences, and the context influence on them.
You have found out that the words and phrases that speak about uniqueness are more frequently encountered when the texts speak about older rock musicians than younger ones. From these results, you can make a conclusion that the rock musicians of the older days have made a bigger contribution to the development of this music genre than their younger counterparts. You may also want to continue your research and look into the influence such a conclusion may have on the audiences and the musicians themselves.
Final Thoughts
You can see how to use content analysis in your research design by using either a quantitative or qualitative approach. When you understand the method’s benefits and limitations, it will be easier for you to decide whether the choice of it is appropriate and can meet all your research goals and objectives.
Content analysis is a very simple and convenient research method because you do not need to spend much effort and costs on organizing experiments and involving participants, so it is suitable if you are a student with limited time and a huge burden of tasks to complete. Using this method properly will bring you the best results.