Content analysis

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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:

Links

General qualitative methodology indexes

Slides

Software

Other wiki pages of interest

(include specialised technologies)

  • 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)


... more should be added here !

Links

  • Text Insight. serves as a research and academic portal for those doing qualitative analysis and text analytics. Main focus of the site is the Leximancer tool However, all researchers, students, academics, and commercial entities are welcome to use this portal and its resources.

References

Analysis of text quality

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
  • 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