Content Analysis - A Step-by-Step Guide With Examples
Content Analysis - A Step-by-Step Guide With Examples
Published on July 18, 2019 by Amy Luo. Revised on February 15, 2021.
Content analysis can be both quantitative (focused on counting and measuring) and
qualitative (focused on interpreting and understanding). In both types, you categorize or
“code” words, themes, and concepts within the texts and then analyze the results.
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Researchers use content analysis to find out about the purposes, messages, and effects of
communication content. They can also make inferences about the producers and audience of
the texts they analyze.
Content analysis can be used to quantify the occurrence of certain words, phrases, subjects or
concepts in a set of historical or contemporary texts.
In addition, content analysis can be used to make qualitative inferences by analyzing the
meaning and semantic relationship of words and concepts.
Because content analysis can be applied to a broad range of texts, it is used in a variety of
fields, including marketing, media studies, anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and
many social science disciplines. It has various possible goals:
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You can analyze communication and social interaction without the direct involvement of
participants, so your presence as a researcher doesn’t influence the results.
When done well, content analysis follows a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated
by other researchers, yielding results with high reliability.
Highly flexible
You can conduct content analysis at any time, in any location, and at low cost – all you need is
access to the appropriate sources.
Academic style
Vague sentences
Grammar
Style consistency
See an example
Subjective
Content analysis almost always involves some level of subjective interpretation, which can
affect the reliability and validity of the results and conclusions.
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Time intensive
Manually coding large volumes of text is extremely time-consuming, and it can be difficult to
automate effectively.
Is there a difference in how the US media represents male and female politicians in
terms of trustworthiness?
The medium (e.g. newspapers, speeches or websites) and genre (e.g. opinion pieces,
political campaign speeches, or marketing copy)
The criteria for inclusion (e.g. newspaper articles that mention a particular event,
speeches by a certain politician, or websites selling a specific type of product)
The parameters in terms of date range, location, etc.
If there are only a small amount of texts that meet your criteria, you might analyze all of them.
If there is a large volume of texts, you can select a sample.
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Next, you need to determine the level at which you will analyze your chosen texts. This means
defining:
The unit(s) of meaning that will be coded. For example, are you going to record the
frequency of individual words and phrases, the characteristics of people who produced
or appear in the texts, the presence and positioning of images, or the treatment of
themes and concepts?
The set of categories that you will use for coding. Categories can be objective
characteristics (e.g. female, aged 40-50, lawyer, mother) or more conceptual (e.g.
trustworthy, corrupt, conservative, family oriented).
Your units of analysis are the politicians who appear in each article and the words and
phrases that are used to describe them. Based on your research question, you have to
categorize based on gender and the concept of trustworthiness. To get more detailed
data, you also code for other categories such as the age, political party, and marital
status of each politician mentioned.
Coding rules are especially important if multiple researchers are involved, but even if you’re
coding all of the text by yourself, recording the rules makes your method more transparent
and reliable.
In considering the category “female politician,” you decide which titles will be coded
with this category (senator, governor, counselor, mayor). With “trustworthy”, you
decide which specific words or phrases related to trustworthiness (e.g. honest and
reliable) will be coded in this category.
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4/2/2021 Content Analysis | A Step-by-Step Guide with Examples
You go through each text and record all relevant data in the appropriate categories. This can
be done manually or aided with computer programs, such as QSR NVivo, Atlas.ti and Diction,
which can help speed up the process of counting and categorizing words and phrases.
Following your coding rules, you examine each newspaper article in your sample. You
record the characteristics of each politician mentioned, along with all words and
phrases related to trustworthiness that are used to describe them.
The results reveal that words and phrases related to trustworthiness appeared in the
same sentence as a male politician more frequently than they did in the same sentence
as a female politician. From these results, you conclude that national newspapers
present male politicians as more trustworthy than female politicians, and infer that this
might have an effect on readers’ perceptions of women in politics.
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Amy Luo
Amy has a master’s degree in History of Art and has been working as a freelance writer and
editor since 2014. She is passionate about helping people communicate clearly and effectively.
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Descriptive research
Descriptive research means observing and measuring without manipulating variables. It can identify characteristics,
trends and correlations.
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