Content Analysis

As it relates to survey research, content analysis is a research method that is applied to the verbatim responses given to open-ended questions in order to code those answers into a meaningful set of categories that lend themselves to further quantitative statistical analysis. In the words of Bernard Berelson, one of the early scholars explaining this method, "Content analysis is a research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication." By coding these verbatim responses into a relatively small set of meaningful categories, survey researchers can create new variables in their survey data sets to use in their analyses.