Content analysis

Content analysis

1. What is it?

   • It is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context.
     • When we collect information from methods where we use open-ended questions, how do we apply meaning to the responses?
       • Content analysis applies significance or meaning to this kind of data and helps to identify patterns in the text.

2. Potential

   • Due to the nature of this technique, It is now becoming a powerful agent in the development of artificial intelligence
     • Being used to draw conclusions and make inferences from messages.

3. Sources

   • We can content analyze messages coming from various sources
     • Essays
     • Journal articles
     • Books and chapters in books
     • Discussions
     • Newspaper
     • Articles or stories
     • Speeches
     • Conversations
     • Interviews

4. Procedures

   • Identify the topic of your research
     • Establish content categories
       • Test the categories generated
         • Collect data
           • Content analysis
             • Qualitative model
               • Qualitative research is concerned with capturing the richness, and describing the unique complexities, of data.
                 • After you got the numerical data from the concept analysis, you apply meaning to that data
                   • "Relational analysis"
                     • Consists of identifying relationships between the themes or issues
                       • Decide the question you want to answer about the possible relations involved in the data you analyzed
                         • Frame the analysis
                           • Decide which types of relationship to examine
                             • Code and categorize the text(s) (p.e. positive and negative comments made about the topic)
                               • Explore the relationships
                                 • Code the relationships
                                   • Analyse the relationship
                                     • Map the relationships
             • Quantitative model
               • Conceptual analysis (This approach examines either the incidence or the frequency of concepts (themes/issues, words, phrases, etc.) in a text. )
                 • Decide on the unit(s)/level of analysis (decide to code for a single word or for a set of words or phrases)
                   • Identify the concepts
                     • Define the concepts
                       • Decide whether to code for incidence or frequency of concepts
                         • Establish coding rules (e.g. if you'll only count the appearance of a word, or their synonyms as well)
                           • Trawl through the information
                             • Code the information
                               • Analyse the results

5. Uses

   • Analyse text and solve issues of disputed authorship of academic papers
   • It has been usefully employed as a descriptor of diverse research techniques used for systematically collecting, analysing and making inferences from messages
   • Development of artificial intelligence
   • Analyze the magnitude of a problem in newspapers
   • Analyze the data collected from other research instruments
   • Others