NAME: MINAL RATHI

ROLL NO: 05
SEMESTER: 04
SUBJECT: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
TOPIC: CONTENT ANALYSYS IN RESEARCH

COURSE: MASTERS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS

SUBMITTED TO: DR. SANGEETA MAKKAD
Content Analysis
Content Analysis is described as the scientific study of content of
communication. It is the study of the content with reference to the meanings,
contexts and intentions contained in messages. The term Content Analysis is 75
years old, and Webster’s Dictionary of English language listed it since 1961.
Content analysis has its own approach to analysing data that stems largely from
how the object of analysis, content, is conceived. As a technique, content
analysis involves specialized procedures. It is learnable and divorceable from
the personal authority of the researcher. As a research technique, content
analysis provides new insights, increases a researcher's understanding of
particular phenomena, or informs practical actions. Content analysis is a
scientific tool. Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable
and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of
their use.
Content analysis is a research tool used to determine the presence of certain
words or concepts within texts or sets of texts. Researchers quantify and analyse
the presence, meanings and relationships of such words and concepts, then
make inferences about the messages within the texts, the writer(s), the audience,
and even the culture and time of which these are a part. Texts can be defined
broadly as books, book chapters, essays, interviews, discussions, newspaper
headlines and articles, historical documents, speeches, conversations,
advertising, theatre, informal conversation, or really any occurrence of
communicative language. Texts in a single study may also represent a variety of
different types of occurrences, such as Palmquist's 1990 study of two
composition classes, in which he analysed student and teacher interviews,
writing journals, classroom discussions and lectures, and out-of-class interaction
sheets. To conduct a content analysis on any such text, the text is coded, or
broken down, into manageable categories on a variety of levels--word, word
sense, phrase, sentence, or theme--and then examined using one of content
analysis' basic methods: conceptual analysis or relational analysis.

Description
Sources of data could be from interviews, open-ended questions, field research
notes, conversations, or literally any occurrence of communicative language
(for example, books, essays, discussions, newspaper headlines, speeches, media,
historical documents). A single study may analyse various forms of text in its
analysis. To analyse the text using content analysis, the text must be coded, or
broken down, into manageable code categories for analysis (i.e. “codes”). Once
the text is coded into code categories, the codes can then be further categorized
into “code categories” to summarize data even further. Content analysis is a
widely used method in communication research and is particularly popular in
media and popular culture studies. Content analysis is a systematic, quantitative
approach to analysing the content or meaning of communicative messages.
Content analysis is a descriptive approach to communication research, and as
such is used to describe communicative phenomenon. This entry provides an
overview of content analysis, including the definition, uses, process, and
limitations of content analysis.

Three different definition of content analysis are provided below.

 Definition 1: “Any technique for making inferences by systematically and

objectively identifying special characteristics of messages.” (from Holsti,
1968)
 Definition 2: “An interpretive and naturalistic approach. It is both
observational and narrative in nature and relies less on the experimental
elements normally associated with scientific research (reliability, validity
and generalizability) (from Ethnography, Observational Research, and
Narrative Inquiry, 1994-2012).
 Definition 3: “A research technique for the objective, systematic and
quantitative description of the manifest content of communication.” (from
Berelson, 1952)

Uses of Content Analysis

 Identify the intentions, focus or communication trends of an individual,
group or institution
 Describe attitudinal and behavioral responses to communications
 Determine psychological or emotional state of persons or groups
 Reveal international differences in communication content
 Reveal patterns in communication content
 Pre-test and improve an intervention or survey prior to launch
 Analyze focus group interviews and open-ended questions to complement
quantitative data

Researchers use content analysis to find out about the purposes, messages, and
effects of communication content. They can also make inferences about the
producers and audience of the texts they analyze.
Content analysis can be used to quantify the occurrence of certain words,
phrases, subjects or concepts in a set of historical or contemporary texts.

Quantitative content analysis example

To research the importance of employment issues in political campaigns, you

could analyze 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.
In addition, content analysis can be used to make qualitative inferences by
analyzing the meaning and semantic relationship of words and concepts.

Qualitative content analysis example

To 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 analyze the meanings of these
relationships to better understand the intentions and targets of different
campaigns.
Because 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. It has various possible
goals:

 Finding correlations and patterns in how concepts are communicated

 Understanding the intentions of an individual, group or institution
 Identifying propaganda and bias in communication
 Revealing differences in communication in different contexts
 Analyzing the consequences of communication content, such as the flow
of information or audience responses

Types of Content Analysis

There are two general types of content analysis: conceptual analysis and
relational analysis. Conceptual analysis determines the existence and frequency
of concepts in a text. Relational analysis develops the conceptual analysis
further by examining the relationships among concepts in a text. Each type of
analysis may lead to different results, conclusions, interpretations and meanings.

Conceptual Analysis
Typically people think of conceptual analysis when they think of content
analysis. In conceptual analysis, a concept is chosen for examination and the
analysis involves quantifying and counting its presence. The main goal is to
examine the occurrence of selected terms in the data. Terms may be explicit or
implicit. Explicit terms are easy to identify. Coding of implicit terms is more
complicated: you need to decide the level of implication and base judgments on
subjectivity (issue for reliability and validity). Therefore, coding of implicit
terms involves using a dictionary or contextual translation rules or both.

To begin a conceptual content analysis, first identify the research question and
choose a sample or samples for analysis. Next, the text must be coded into
manageable content categories. This is basically a process of selective
reduction. By reducing the text to categories, the researcher can focus on and
code for specific words or patterns that inform the research question.

General steps for conducting a conceptual content analysis:

1. Decide the level of analysis: word, word sense, phrase, sentence, themes

2. Decide how many concepts to code for: develop pre-defined or interactive set
of categories or concepts. Decide either: A. to allow flexibility to add categories
through the coding process, or B. to stick with the pre-defined set of categories.

 Option A allows for the introduction and analysis of new and important
material that could have significant implications to one’s research
question.
 Option B allows the researcher to stay focused and examine the data for
specific concepts.

3. Decide whether to code for existence or frequency of a concept. The decision

changes the coding process.

 When coding for the existence of a concept, the researcher would count a
concept only once if it appeared at least once in the data and no matter
how many times it appeared.
 When coding for the frequency of a concept, the researcher would count
the number of times a concept appears in a text.

4. Decide on how you will distinguish among concepts:

 Should text be coded exactly as they appear or coded as the same when
they appear in different forms? For example, “dangerous” vs.
“dangerousness”. The point here is to create coding rules so that these
 word segments are transparently categorized in a logical fashion. The
rules could make all of these word segments fall into the same category,
or perhaps the rules can be formulated so that the researcher can
distinguish these word segments into separate codes.
 What level of implication is to be allowed? Words that imply the concept
or words that explicitly state the concept? For example, “dangerous” vs.
“the person is scary” vs. “that person could cause harm to me”. These
word segments may not merit separate categories, due the implicit
meaning of “dangerous”.

5. Develop rules for coding your texts. After decisions of steps 1-4 are
complete, a researcher can begin developing rules for translation of text into
codes. This will keep the coding process organized and consistent. The
researcher can code for exactly what he/she wants to code. Validity of the
coding process is ensured when the researcher is consistent and coherent in their
codes, meaning that they follow their translation rules. In content analysis,
obeying by the translation rules is equivalent to validity.

6. Decide what to do with irrelevant information: should this be ignored (e.g.

common English words like “the” and “and”), or used to reexamine the coding
scheme in the case that it would add to the outcome of coding?

7. Code the text: This can be done by hand or by using software. By using
software, researchers can input categories and have coding done automatically,
quickly and efficiently, by the software program. When coding is done by hand,
a researcher can recognize error far more easily (e.g. typos, misspelling). If
using computer coding, text could be cleaned of errors to include all available
data. This decision of hand vs. computer coding is most relevant for implicit
information where category preparation is essential for accurate coding.

8. Analyze your results: Draw conclusions and generalizations where possible.

Determine what to do with irrelevant, unwanted or unused text: reexamine,
ignore, or reassess the coding scheme. Interpret results carefully as conceptual
content analysis can only quantify the information. Typically, general trends
and patterns can be identified.

Relational Analysis

Relational analysis begins like conceptual analysis, where a concept is chosen

for examination. However, the analysis involves exploring the relationships
between concepts. Individual concepts are viewed as having no inherent
meaning and rather the meaning is a product of the relationships among
concepts.
To begin a relational content analysis, first identify a research question and
choose a sample or samples for analysis. The research question must be focused
so the concept types are not open to interpretation and can be summarized.
Next, select text for analysis. Select text for analysis carefully by balancing
having enough information for a thorough analysis so results are not limited
with having information that is too extensive so that the coding process
becomes too arduous and heavy to supply meaningful and worthwhile results.

There are three subcategories of relational analysis to choose from prior to

going on to the general steps.

1. Affect extraction: an emotional evaluation of concepts explicit in a text.

A challenge to this method is that emotions can vary across time,
populations, and space. However, it could be effective at capturing the
emotional and psychological state of the speaker or writer of the text.
2. Proximity analysis: an evaluation of the co-occurrence of explicit
concepts in the text. Text is defined as a string of words called a
“window” that is scanned for the co-occurrence of concepts. The result is
the creation of a “concept matrix”, or a group of interrelated co-occurring
concepts that would suggest an overall meaning.
3. Cognitive mapping: a visualization technique for either affect extraction
or proximity analysis. Cognitive mapping attempts to create a model of
the overall meaning of the text such as a graphic map that represents the
relationships between concepts.

General steps for conducting a relational content analysis:

1. Determine the type of analysis: Once the sample has been selected, the
researcher needs to determine what types of relationships to examine and the
level of analysis: word, word sense, phrase, sentence, themes.
2. Reduce the text to categories and code for words or patterns. A researcher can
code for existence of meanings or words.
3. Explore the relationship between concepts: once the words are coded, the text
can be analyzed for the following:

 Strength of relationship: degree to which two or more concepts are

related.
 Sign of relationship: are concepts positively or negatively related to each
other?
 Direction of relationship: the types of relationship that categories exhibit.
For example, “X implies Y” or “X occurs before Y” or “if X then Y” or if
X is the primary motivator of Y.
4. Code the relationships: a difference between conceptual and relational
analysis is that the statements or relationships between concepts are coded.
5. Perform statistical analyses: explore differences or look for relationships
among the identified variables during coding.
6. Map out representations: such as decision mapping and mental models.

Reliability and Validity

Reliability: Because of the human nature of researchers, coding errors can never
be eliminated but only minimized. Generally, 80% is an acceptable margin for
reliability. Three criteria comprise the reliability of a content analysis:

1. Stability: the tendency for coders to consistently re-code the same data in
the same way over a period of time.
2. Reproducibility: tendency for a group of coders to classify categories
membership in the same way.
3. Accuracy: extent to which the classification of text corresponds to a
standard or norm statistically.

Validity: Three criteria comprise the validity of a content analysis:

1. Closeness of categories: this can be achieved by utilizing multiple

classifiers to arrive at an agreed upon definition of each specific category.
Using multiple classifiers, a concept category that may be an explicit
variable can be broadened to include synonyms or implicit variables.
2. Conclusions: What level of implication is allowable? Do conclusions
correctly follow the data? Are results explainable by other phenomena?
This becomes especially problematic when using computer software for
analysis and distinguishing between synonyms. For example, the word
“mine,” variously denotes a personal pronoun, an explosive device, and a
deep hole in the ground from which ore is extracted. Software can obtain
an accurate count of that word’s occurrence and frequency, but not be
able to produce an accurate accounting of the meaning inherent in each
particular usage. This problem could throw off one’s results and make
any conclusion invalid.
3. Generalizability of the results to a theory: dependent on the clear
definitions of concept categories, how they are determined and how
reliable they are at measuring the idea one is seeking to measure.
Generalizability parallels reliability as much of it depends on the three
criteria for reliability.
Advantages of content analysis
 Unobtrusive data collection

You can analyze communication and social interaction without the direct
involvement of participants, so your presence as a researcher doesn’t influence
the results.

 Transparent and replicable

When done well, content analysis follows a systematic procedure that can easily
be replicated by other researchers, yielding results with high reliability.

 Highly flexible

You can conduct content analysis at any time, in any location, and at low cost –
all you need is access to the appropriate sources.

Disadvantages of content analysis

 Reductive

Focusing on words or phrases in isolation can sometimes be overly reductive,

disregarding context, nuance, and ambiguous meanings.

 Subjective

Content analysis almost always involves some level of subjective interpretation,

which can affect the reliability and validity of the results and conclusions.

 Time intensive

Manually coding large volumes of text is extremely time-consuming, and it can

be difficult to automate effectively.
Conclusion
To sum up, content analysis is a useful research technique for analysing large
bodies of text. It offers objective guidelines in the coding of the text and to draw
inferences from the data. It helps in the coding of the text according to
systematic and objective rules and in drawing inferences from the data. A
successful content analysis study is the outcome of a series of good decisions.
The process starts from the point of deciding whether the method is suitable to
study the research topic under question. After clearly setting out the objectives
of the study, the researcher proceeds to make decisions relating to units of
analysis, developing content categories, sample and the sampling period.
Orienting coders, checking inter coder reliabilities and selecting appropriate
statistical designs for presenting results are some of the essential tasks, which
add rigor to the study.
Content analysis has its limitations. What it does not tell us is about causal
connections between variables under study. For example, it is good at capturing
the changing trends in the subject content of professional articles published in a
journal (Loy, 1979). But it cannot answer why there were changes in the subject
content. Further, though a popular research method both in the Social sciences
and Mass communications, it is still used as a technique to supplement the
findings of mainstream research designs such as survey research. Woodrum
(1984) rightly argues that “content analysis remains an under utilized research
method with great potential for studying beliefs, organizations, attitudes and
human relations. The limited application and development of content analysis is
due more to unfamiliarity with the method and to its historic isolation from
main stream social science than to its inherent limitations”.

Bibliography
colostate. 2004. "An Introduction to Content Analysis." An Introduction to
Content Analysis.
Neuendorf, Kimberly A. 2005. "The Content Analysis Guidebook." The Content
Analysis Guidebook.
Stemler, Steve. 2000. "An overview of content analysis." An overview of
content analysis.
william, ellie. 2018. "Research Methods - Content Analysis." Research Methods
- Content Analysis.