content analysis

Content analysis meaning

Quantifies the frequency of themes/coding units in data. This has been wide used in psychology to analyse the content of various forms of communication, including data from interviews, questionnaire and observation. It’s a mean of quantifying qualitative data usually following a separate procedure.

Conducting content analysis

1. Initially becoming increasingly familiar with the data by going through it several times. this could be a speech, a film, a transcript or an interview

2. This helps identify any relevant categories/coding units that can be used to dissect data

3. The researcher works through the data again and uses a behaviour checklist to tally down the frequency that each coding unit appears

4. This provides categorical/nominal data that can be displayed in graphs and statistically analysed by using stats test

Strengths

It compliments other methods. The technique can be used to cross verified results from other research methods/triangulation of methods and is particularly useful to trace effects overtime e.g. in a longitudinal research.

Reliability, consistency and standardisation

Weaknesses

Difficult to make cause and effect statements, e.g. and lack of causality

Quality of the data