13 Facts About Content analysis

Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video.

Content analysis is best understood as a broad family of techniques.

Simplest and most objective form of content analysis considers unambiguous characteristics of the text such as word frequencies, the page area taken by a newspaper column, or the duration of a radio or television program.

Additionally, quantitative content analysis begins with a framed hypothesis with coding decided on before the analysis begins.

Content analysis acknowledges an "overlap" of qualitative and quantitative content analysis.

Furthermore, the Database of Variables for Content Analysis provides an open access archive of pretested variables and established codebooks for content analyses.

Computer-assisted Content analysis can help with large, electronic data sets by cutting out time and eliminating the need for multiple human coders to establish inter-coder reliability.

Content analysis is research using the categorization and classification of speech, written text, interviews, images, or other forms of communication.

In recent times, particularly with the advent of mass communication, content analysis has known an increasing use to deeply analyze and understand media content and media logic.

Quantitative content analysis has enjoyed a renewed popularity in recent years thanks to technological advances and fruitful application in of mass communication and personal communication research.

Krippendorff argues that quantitative and qualitative approaches to content analysis tend to overlap, and that there can be no generalisable conclusion as to which approach is superior.

Content analysis can be described as studying traces, which are documents from past times, and artifacts, which are non-linguistic documents.

In particular, if access to the goal of Content analysis can be obtained by direct means without material interference, then direct measurement techniques yield better data.