Content Analysis

Content analysis is a research strategy that examines the presence of concepts in texts, such as interviews, discussions, newspaper headlines and articles, historical documents, speeches, conversations, advertisements, theater, informal conversations, performances, drawings, or images. Evaluators analyze the presence, meanings, and relationships of words and concepts and make inferences about the messages within the texts, the writers, the audience, the program, the organization, and even the larger culture.

This type of analysis may be qualitative or quantitative and involves breaking the text into manageable categories that are labeled, or “coded.” These categories may be words, phrases, sentences, or themes. A content analysis requires decisions about sampling (what will be included), the unit of analysis (the size and boundaries of the unit of text), and the goals of the analysis. A content analysis may be conceptual or relational. Conceptual analysis establishes the existence and frequency of concepts (perhaps by examination of the most frequently used words, phrases, metaphors, or concepts), and relational analysis examines the relationship among concepts in the text (perhaps by looking at the co-occurrence of particular concepts).

Content analysis is useful for directly and unobtrusively analyzing language use, meaning, relationships, and changes over time. It can, however, be time consuming, can be open to multiple interpretations, may be simplistic if the focus is primarily on word counts, and may take texts out of context. The use of qualitative data analysis software has increased the feasibility and quality of content analysis tremendously.