Content Analysis Presented by: Eric S. Riley

What we’re going to cover – Fast…  What is Content Analysis  Rough History of Content Analysis  The Procedure  Step by Step procedural analysis of Lynch & Smith

What is Content Analysis  A form of textual analysis *usually*  Categorizes chunks of text according to Code  Blend of qualitative and quantitative Schwandt, Thomas A. Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. 2nd ed. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001.

Rough History - 1  Classical Content Analysis Used as early as the 30’s in military intelligence Analyzed items such as communist propaganda, and military speeches for themes Created matrices searching for the number of occurrences of particular words/phrases Roberts, C.W. "Content Analysis." International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier: Amsterdam, 2001.

Rough History - 2  (New) Content Analysis* Moved into Social Science Research Study trends in Media, Politics, and provides method for analyzing open ended questions Can include visual documents as well as texts More of a focus on phrasal/categorical entities than simple word counting *My own terminology, more generally referred to as simply “Content Analysis”

Procedure  Identifying a corpus of texts and Sample Pop.  Determine unit of analysis  Find Themes (inductive or deductive)  Build a Codebook  Mark the texts  Analyze the code from texts quantitatively Denzin, Norman K. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2000.

Procedure – 1. Identifying Texts  Texts can be either Pre-existing cultural documents  Newscasts, presidential letters, etc. Constructed experimental documents  Responses to a survey, transcript of an interview, etc.  What were the texts from our article today?  How was the sample population derived?  What do you think about their sample?

Procedure – 2. Unit of Analysis  Units of analysis are variable  Depth is dependent upon the information need  What is the unit of analysis for this study?

Procedure – 3. Find Themes  Finding themes in the content can be either Inductive  Preconstructed solid template of categories Deductive  Derives themes as they arise in the content  How did authors find themes?  What were their themes?

Procedure – 4. Build a Codebook  Codebook: An organized list of codes  Details Provides a description of the code Often hierarchical Inclusion/Exclusion criteria Examples  How did our authors build their codebook?  Did they modify anything?

Procedure – 5. Marking the Texts  By hand vs. Computer  Using the codebook, you mark the attributes of individual texts  Inter-coder consistency statistics  Do you think that we would be able to recreate this methodology?

Procedure – 6. Analyze Code  Can be done in a table format as here  Can be done graphically in charts  Usually analyzed from multiple perspectives

Where we’ve been  What is Content Analysis  Rough History of Content Analysis  The Procedure  Step by Step procedural analysis of Lynch & Smith

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