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Content analysis
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Content analysis (also called: textual analysis) is a standard methodology in the

social sciences on the subject of communication content. Earl Babbie defines it as
"the study of recorded human communications, such as books, web sites, paintings
and laws". Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who
says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?". Ole Holsti (1969)
offers a broad definition of content analysis as "any technique for making inferences
by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages"
(p. 14).

Contents
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• 1 Description
• 2 Uses of Content Analysis
• 3 The Process of a Content Analysis
• 4 References
• 5 See also

• 6 External links
[edit]

Description
The method of content analysis enables the researcher to include large amounts of
textual information and systematically identify its properties, e.g. the frequencies of
most used keywords (KWIC meaning "KeyWord In Context") by detecting the more
important structures of its communication content. Yet such amounts of textual
information must be categorised according to a certain theoretical framework, which
will inform the data analysis, providing at the end a meaningful reading of content
under scrutiny. David Robertson (1976:73-75) for example created a coding frame for
a comparison of modes of party competition between British and American parties. It
was developed further in 1979 by the Manifesto Research Group aiming at a
comparative content-analytic approach on the policy positions of political parties.
This classification scheme was also used to accomplish a comparative analysis
between the 1989 and 1994 Brazilian party broadcasts and manifestos by F. Carvalho
[1] (2000).
Since the 1980s, content analysis has become an increasingly important tool in the
measurement of success in public relations (notably media relations) programs and
the assessment of media profiles. In these circumstances, content analysis is an
element of media evaluation or media analysis. In analyses of this type, data from
content analysis is usually combined with media data (circulation, readership, number
of viewers and listeners, frequency of publication).

The creation of coding frames is intrinsically related to a creative approach to

variables that exert an influence over textual content. In political analysis, these
variables could be political scandals, the impact of public opinion polls, sudden events
in external politics, inflation etc. Mimetic Convergence, created by F. Carvalho for the
comparative analysis of electoral proclamations on free-to-air television is an example
of creative articulation of variables in content analysis. The methodology describes
the construction of party identities during long-term party competitions on TV, from a
dynamic perspective, governed by the logic of the contingent. This method aims to
capture the contingent logic observed in electoral campaigns by focusing on the
repetition and innovation of themes sustained in party broadcasts. According to such
post-structuralist perspective from which electoral competition is analysed, the party
identities, 'the real' cannot speak without mediations because there is not a natural
centre fixing the meaning of a party structure, it rather depends on ad-hoc
articulations. There is no empirical reality outside articulations of meaning. Reality is
an outcome of power struggles that unify ideas of social structure as a result of
contingent interventions. In Brazil, these contingent interventions have proven to be
mimetic and convergent rather than divergent and polarised, being integral to the
repetition of dichotomised worldviews.

Mimetic Convergence thus aims to show the process of fixation of meaning through
discursive articulations that repeat, alter and subvert political issues that come into
play. For this reason, parties are not taken as the pure expression of conflicts for the
representation of interests (of different classes, religions, ethnic groups (see: Lipset &
Rokkan 1967, Lijphart 1984) but attempts to recompose and re-articulate ideas of an
absent totality around signifiers gaining positivity.

Content analysis has been criticised for being a positivist methodology, yet here is an
example of a methodology used to organise a content analysis which is able to capture
the logic of the contingent dominating the political field, enabling an analysis of the
constitution of party identities from the theoretical perspective of deconstruction and
theory of hegemony.

Every content analysis should depart from a hypothesis. The hypothesis of Mimetic
Convergence supports the Downsian interpretation that in general, rational voters
converge in the direction of uniform positions in most thematic dimensions. The
hypothesis guiding the analysis of Mimetic Convergence between political parties'
broadcasts is: 'public opinion polls on vote intention, published throughout campaigns
on TV will contribute to successive revisions of candidates' discourses. Candidates re-
orient their arguments and thematic selections in part by the signals sent by voters.
One must also consider the interference of other kinds of input on electoral
propaganda such as internal and external political crises and the arbitrary interference
of private interests on the dispute. Moments of internal crisis in disputes between
candidates might result from the exhaustion of a certain strategy. The moments of
exhaustion might consequently precipitate an inversion in the thematic flux.

As an evaluation approach, content analysis is considered to be quasi-evaluation

because content analysis judgments need not be based on value statements. Instead,
they can be based on knowledge. Such content analyses are not evaluations. On the
other hand, when content analysis judgments are based on values, such studies are
evaluations (Frisbie, 1986).

As demonstrated above, only a good scientific hypothesis can lead to the development
of a methodology that will allow the empirical description, be it dynamic or static.

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Uses of Content Analysis

Holsti (1969) groups fifteen uses of content analysis into three basic categories: make
inferences about the antecedents of a communication, describe and make inferences
about characteristics of a communication, and make inferences about the effects of a
communication. He also places these uses into the context of the basic communication
paradigm.

The following table shows fifteen uses of content analysis in terms of their general
purpose, element of the communication paradigm to which they apply, and the
general question they are intended to answer.

Uses of Content Analysis by Purpose, Communication Element, and Question

Purpose Element Question Use
• Answer questions of
Source Who?
disputed authorship
• Secure political &
military intelligence
Make inferences about the • Analyze traits of
antecedents of individuals
communications Encoding
Why? • Infer cultural aspects
process
& change

• Provide legal &

evaluative evidence
Describe & make • Analyze techniques
inferences about the of persuasion
Channel How?
characteristics of
communications • Analyze style
Message What? • Describe trends in
communication
 content
• Relate known
characteristics of
sources to messages
they produce

• Compare
communication
content to standards
• Relate known
characteristics of
audiences to
messages produced
Recipient To whom?
for them

• Describe patterns of
communication
• Measure readability
• Analyze the flow of
Make inferences about the
Decoding With what information
consequences of
process effect?
communications
• Assess responses to
communications
Note. Purpose, communication element, & question from Holsti (1969). Uses
primarily from Berelson (1952) as adapted by Holsti (1969).
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The Process of a Content Analysis

According to Dr. Klaus Krippendorff (1980 and 2004), six questions must be
addressed in every content analysis:

1. Which data are analyzed?

2. How are they defined?
3. What is the population from which they are drawn?
4. What is the context relative to which the data are analyzed?
5. What are the boundaries of the analysis?
6. What is the target of the inferences?

According to Zipf's Law, the assumption is that words and phrases mentioned most
often are those reflecting important concerns in every communication. Therefore,
quantitative content analysis starts with word frequencies, space measurements
(column centimeters/inches in the case of newspapers), time counts (for radio and
television time) and keyword frequencies. However, content analysis extends far
beyond plain word counts, e.g. with Keyword In Context routines words can be
analysed in their specific context to be disambiguated. Synonyms and homonyms can
be isolated in accordance to linguistic properties of a language.

Qualitatively, content analysis can involve any kind of analysis where communication
content (speech, written text, interviews, images ...) is categorized and classified. In
its beginnings, using the first newspapers at the end of 19th century, analysis was
done manually by measuring the number of lines and amount of space given a subject.
With the rise of common computing facilities like PCs, computer-based methods of
analysis are growing in popularity. Answers to open ended questions, newspaper
articles, political party manifestoes, medical records or systematic observations in
experiments can all be subject to systematic analysis of textual data. By having
contents of communication available in form of machine readable texts, the input is
analysed for frequencies and coded into categories for building up inferences. Robert
Philip Weber (1990) notes: "To make valid inferences from the text, it is important
that the classification procedure be reliable in the sense of being consistent: Different
people should code the same text in the same way" (p. 12). The validity, inter-coder
reliability and intra-coder reliability are subject to intense methodological research
efforts over long years (see Krippendorf, 2004).

One more distinction is between the manifest contents (of communication) and its
latent meaning. "Manifest" describes what (an author or speaker) definitely has
written, while latent meaning describes what an author intended to say/write.
Normally, content analysis can only be applied on manifest content; that is, the words,
sentences, or texts themselves, rather than their meanings.

Dermot McKeone (1995) has highlighted the difference between prescriptive analysis
and open analysis. In prescriptive analysis, the context is a closely-defined set of
communication parameters (e.g. specific messages, subject matter); open analysis
identifies the dominant messages and subject matter within the text.

A further step in analysis is the distinction between dictionary-based (quantitative)

approaches and qualitative approaches. Dictionary-based approaches set up a list of
categories derived from the frequency list of words and control the distribution of
words and their respective categories over the texts. While methods in quantitative
content analysis in this way transform observations of found categories into
quantitative statistical data, the qualitative content analysis focuses more on the
intentionality and its implications.

[edit]

References
• Earl Babbie, 'The Practice of Social Research', 10th edition, Wadsworth,
Thomson Learning Inc., ISBN 0-534-62029-9

• Bernard Berelson: Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe, Ill:

Free Press 1971 (first edition from 1952)
• Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann [Link].: Mapping Policy Preferences.
Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998. Oxford 2001:
Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-924400-6 (great example of application
of content analysis methods in Political Science dealing with political parties
and its impact on electoral systems)

• Richard Frisbie: The use of microcomputer programs to improve the

reliability and validity of content analysis in evaluation. Paper presented at the
session, Qualitative research methods, at the Annual Meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, San Francisco. 1986, April

• Ole R. Holsti: Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Reading, Mass. 1969

• Klaus Krippendorf: Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology.

2nd edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2004 (currently the most important
book available, first edition was from 1980)

• Dermot McKeone: Measuring Your Media Profile, Gower Press, 1995 A

general introduction to media analysis and PR evaluation for the
communications industry

• Carl W. Roberts (ed.): Text Analysis for the Social Sciences: Methods for
Drawing Inferences from Texts and Transcripts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum 1997

• Robert Philip Weber: Basic Content Analysis. 2nd ed., Newbury Park, CA:
Sage 1990 (recommended introductory reading)

• Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick Mass Media Research: An

Introduction. 8th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005).