Content analysis
Systematically interpret or classify content
Content analysis systematically categorises communication or documents. Qualitative conventional analysis develops categories from data, directed analysis starts with theory-informed categories, and summative analysis examines counts in context. Quantitative content analysis instead prioritises reproducible category assignment and numerical patterns. These traditions share organised attention to content but differ in epistemology, units, inference and appropriate quality procedures.
Choose when a defined corpus and explicit categories help answer questions about represented content or meaning. Decide whether interpretation or reproducible measurement is primary before selecting coding and quality procedures.
Strengths
- Makes corpus selection and categories explicit
- Supports systematic comparison across document groups
Limitations
- Category design can strip content from context
- Counts can be mistaken for importance or social prevalence
Know the boundary
Hsieh and Shannon's qualitative approaches should not be treated as identical to quantitative frequency coding.