Relational Analysis

As with other approaches to qualitative and quantitative research methods, relational (content) analysis is concerned with understanding or measuring verbal or nonverbal communication messages (or the exchange of information between a sender and a receiver). Such communication can exist in various forms (e.g., campaign/political speeches, classroom discussions or written assignments, documents including records or patients' charts, interviews). Mike Palmquist has discussed three variations that exist in regard to how researchers go about examining the relationships between concepts:

• Some investigators proceed on the basis of the explicit emotional tone of the concepts for a given time and specific societal segment; this basis represents an affect extraction approach.
• Other researchers use what Palmquist refers to as proximity analysis, that is, identifying relationships between those concepts that tend to occur together. A recent illustrative example from the mass media would be how the concept of hope was conveyed in the phrase “Yes we can … change.”
• A third approach used by researchers to analyze the relationship between concepts is cognitive mapping, which involves the creation of a framework (or model) for the entire text that will lend itself to a statistical and automated analysis of the changes in the meaning of the concepts through physical and temporal time and space.

An illustrative example of the third approach to relational analysis is the work of Palmquist and his colleagues. They use the term relational analysis to refer to their approach to mapping people's conceptual understanding of specific knowledge domains and, in the case of texts, of mapping the relationships between key concepts established by the authors in their work. Palmquist's use of a range of computer programs has afforded him, and colleagues like Kathleen Carley, to conduct quantitative analyses of very large quantities of text.