Content analysis

Explanations > Social Research > Analysis > Content analysis

Description | Discussion | See also

Description

The words in a document can provide useful information beyond the superficial meaning.

Thematic Analysis identifies ideas and principles running through the text or appearing more than once.
Indexing extracts key words, which may be listed alphabetically with the text that precedes and follows it in place so you can see the word in the context.
Quantitative Descriptive Analysis counts words to identify frequency of usage.

Discussion

if you are prepared to read between the lines when doing social research, documents can provide deep insights and useful additional information.

Key Words In Context (KWiC) is a computer program that is commonly used for indexing. It automatically scans and creates an index for text. Quantitative descriptive analysis is also easily done with a computer system.

Content analysis should not be the only method used in a piece of social research, however it can be a useful supplementary technique and has the advantage of being unobtrusive.