You can conduct content analysis at any time, in any location, and at low cost. When done well, content analysis follows a systematic procedure that can easily be replicated by other researchers, yielding results with high reliability. You can analyse communication and social interaction without the direct involvement of participants, so your presence as a researcher doesn’t influence the results. Analysing the consequences of communication content, such as the flow of information or audience responses.Revealing differences in communication in different contexts.Identifying propaganda and bias in communication.Understanding the intentions of an individual, group, or institution.Finding correlations and patterns in how concepts are communicated.Example: Qualitative content analysisTo gain a more qualitative understanding of employment issues in political campaigns, you could locate the word ‘unemployment’ in speeches, identify what other words or phrases appear next to it (such as ‘economy’, ‘inequality’, or ‘laziness’), and analyse the meanings of these relationships to better understand the intentions and targets of different campaigns.īecause content analysis can be applied to a broad range of texts, it is used in a variety of fields, including marketing, media studies, anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and many social science disciplines. In addition, content analysis can be used to make qualitative inferences by analysing the meaning and semantic relationship of words and concepts. Example: Quantitative content analysisTo research the importance of employment issues in political campaigns, you could analyse campaign speeches for the frequency of terms such as ‘unemployment’, ‘jobs’, and ‘work’ and use statistical analysis to find differences over time or between candidates. They can also make inferences about the producers and audience of the texts they analyse.Ĭontent analysis can be used to quantify the occurrence of certain words, phrases, subjects, or concepts in a set of historical or contemporary texts. Researchers use content analysis to find out about the purposes, messages, and effects of communication content. Probability vs non-probability sampling.

Nvivo discourse analysis