Content Analysis Versus Discourse Analysis: Examination of Corporate Social Responsibility in Companies' Homepage Texts

Abstract

One of the main aims of my PhD research project is to grasp how Hungarian medium-sized and large companies define their societal role and their social responsibilities. I did not want to use survey or interview data, but rather I attempted to map how these themes appear in corporate discourse. Therefore, I analysed corporate homepages with two methods, namely, content and discourse analyses. These two methods complemented each other during the analysis and provided both quantitative and qualitative data. After a brief methodological overview, this case study presents the main differences of the two methodological approaches through three dimensions. The first dimension concerns the coding process, while the second and the third are related to the differences in the actual analyses of texts and the role the context plays in these analyses.