Content analysis for beginners

1. Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which
might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use
content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic
manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyse social
phenomena is its non-invasive nature, in contrast to simulating social experiences or
collecting survey answers.
Practices and philosophies of content analysis vary between academic disciplines.
They all involve systematic reading or observation of texts or artifacts which are
assigned labels (sometimes called codes) to indicate the presence of interesting,
meaningful pieces of content. By systematically labelling the content of a set of texts,
researchers can analyse patterns of content quantitatively using statistical methods,
or use qualitative methods to analyse meanings of content within texts.
Content analysis is research using the categorization and classification of speech,
written text, interviews, images, or other forms of communication. In its beginnings,
using the first newspapers at the end of the 19th century, analysis was done
manually by measuring the number of columns given a subject. The approach can
also be traced back to a university student studying patterns in Shakespeare's
literature in 1893.
Over the years, content analysis has been applied to a variety of scopes.
Hermeneutics and philology have long used content analysis to interpret sacred and
profane texts and, in many cases, to attribute texts' authorship and authenticity.
In recent times, particularly with the advent of mass communication, content analysis
has known an increasing use to deeply analyse and understand media content and
media logic. The political scientist Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of
content analysis in its early-mid 20th-century mainstream version: "Who says what,
to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?".The strong emphasis for a
quantitative approach started up by Lasswell was finally carried out by another
"father" of content analysis, Bernard Berelson, who proposed a definition of content
analysis which, from this point of view, is emblematic: "a research technique for the
objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of
communication".
Quantitative content analysis has enjoyed a renewed popularity in recent years
thanks to technological advances and fruitful application in of mass communication
and personal communication research. Content analysis of textual big data produced
by new media, particularly social media and mobile devices has become popular.
These approaches take a simplified view of language that ignores the complexity of
semiosis, the process by which meaning is formed out of language. Quantitative
content analysts have been criticized for limiting the scope of content analysis to
simple counting, and for applying the measurement methodologies of the natural

2. sciences without reflecting critically on their appropriateness to social science.
Conversely, qualitative content analysts have been criticized for being insufficiently
systematic and too impressionistic. Krippendorff argues that quantitative and
qualitative approaches to content analysis tend to overlap, and that there can be no
generalisable conclusion as to which approach is superior.
Reference:
Berelson, B. (1952). Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe: Free
Press.
Krippendorff, Klaus (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology.
California: Sage.