Content analysis

Draft

Definition

Content analysis is a family of qualitative data analysis methods.

“Content analysis (sometimes called textual analysis when dealing exclusively with text) is a standard methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws." Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?." Ole Holsti (1969) offers a broad definition of content analysis as "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages."” (Wikipedia, retrieved nov 1 2007)

See also:

• Computer assisted qualitative research analysis software
• Methodology tutorial - qualitative data analysis

Links

General qualitative methodology indexes

• The Qualitative Report (both a journal and an index)
• QualPage by Judy Norris. Very good site (traditional academic build)
• The qualitative Research Page by Bobbi Kerlin, also maintains the Qualitative ResearchWebring
• Grounded Theory Methodology Karl "Chuck B." Freiherr von Manteuffel ...
• Qualnet, in particular Qualitative Research Resources
• Action Research Sources (by Bob Dick, Southern Cross University)

Slides

• Daniel K. Schneider once made some slides for a crash course on research design in educational technology PDF (ok for starters, but would need some extra work). See the chapter on qualitative data analysis.

Software

Other wiki pages of interest

(include specialised technologies)

• For computer-assisted manual analysis, see Computer assisted qualitative research analysis software

• For wikis analytics (various methods, techniques and tools), see Wiki metrics, rubrics and collaboration tools

• latent semantic analysis and indexing, a family of analysis techniques that that assume that a text contains a semantic structure through a kind vector space model and some kind of factor analysis that identifies relationships between terms.

List of tools

• Leximancer, allows to summarize and navigate large text data (e.g. a wiki site) with various visualization tools. (commercial, $750 AUD single license or $150 one-month online)

• CRAN Task View: Natural Language Processing contains a list of packages useful for natural language processing.

... more should be added here !

References

Analysis of on-line interactions

• De Wever, B., Schellens, T., Valcke, M., and Van Keer, H. 2006. Content analysis schemes to analyze transcripts of online asynchronous discussion groups: a review. Comput. Educ. 46, 1 (Jan. 2006), 6-28. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.005

• Naidu, S. and Järvelä, S. 2006. Analyzing CMC content for what?. Computers and Education 46, 1 (Jan. 2006), 96-103. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.001

• Pena-Shaff, J. B. and Nicholls, C. 2004. Analyzing student interactions and meaning construction in computer bulletin board discussions. Computers and Education 42, 3 (Apr. 2004), 243-265. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2003.08.003

• Rourke, L., Anderson, T., Garrison, D. R., & Archer, W. (2001). Methodological Issues in the Content Analysis of Computer Conference Transcripts. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 12(1), 8-22. PDF

• Schrire, S. 2006. Knowledge building in asynchronous discussion groups: going beyond quantitative analysis. Comput. Educ. 46, 1 (Jan. 2006), 49-70. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.006

• Strijbos, J., Martens, R. L., Prins, F. J., and Jochems, W. M. 2006. Content analysis: what are they talking about?. Computers and Education 46, 1 (Jan. 2006), 29-48. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.002