Content analysis

Content analysis (also called: textual analysis) is a standard methodology in the social sciences on the subject of communication content.
Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extend 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" (p. 14).
The method of content analysis enables the researcher to include large amounts of
textual information and identify systematically its properties, e.g. the frequencies of
most used keywords (KWIC = Keyword In Context) by detecting the more important structures of its
communication content. Yet such amounts of textual information must be categorised according to a certain theoretical framework, which will inform the data analysis, providing at the end a meaningful reading of content under scrutiny. David Robertson (1976:73-75) for example created a coding frame for a comparison of modes of party competition between British and American Parties. It was developed further in 1979 by the Manifesto Research Group aiming at a comparative content-analytic approach on the policy positions of political parties. This classification scheme was also used to accomplish a comparative analysis between the 1989 and 1994 Brazilian party broadcasts and manifestos by F. Carvalho (2000).

The creation of coding frames is intrinsically related to a creative approach to variables that exert an influence over textual content. In political analysis, these variables could be political scandals, the impact of public opinion polls, sudden events in external politics, inflation etc.
Mimetic Convergence, created by F. Carvalho for the comparative analysis of electoral proclamations on free-to-air television is an example of creative articulation of variables in content analysis. The methodology describes the construction of party identities during long-term party competitions on TV, from a dynamic perspective, governed by the logic of the contingent. This method aims to capture the contingent logic observed in electoral campaigns by focusing on the repetition and innovation of themes sustained in party broadcasts. According to such post-structuralist perspective from which electoral competition is analysed, the party identities, 'the real' cannot speak without mediations because there is not a natural centre fixing the meaning of a party structure, it rather depends on ad-hoc articulations. There is no empirical reality outside articulations of meaning. Reality is an outcome of power struggles that unify ideas of social structure as a result of contingent interventions. In Brazil, these contingent interventions have proven to be mimetic and convergent rather than divergent and polarised, being integral to the repetition of dichotomised worldviews.
Mimetic Convergence thus aims to show the process of fixation of meaning through discursive articulations that repeat, alter and subvert political issues that come into play. For this reason, parties are not taken as the pure expression of conflicts for the representation of interests (of different classes, religions, ethnic groups (see: Lipset & Rokkan 1967, Lijphart 1984) but attempts to recompose and re-articulate ideas of an absent totality around signifiers gaining positivity.
Content Analysis has been criticised for being a positivist methodology, yet here is an example of a methodology used to organise a content analysis which is able to capture the logic of the contingent dominating the political field, enabling an analysis of the constitution of party identities from the theoretical perspective of deconstruction and theory of hegemony.
Every content analysis should depart from a hypothesis. The hypothesis of Mimetic Convergence supports the Down'sian interpretation that in general, rational voters converge in the direction of uniform positions in most thematic dimensions. The hypothesis guiding the analysis of Mimetic Convergence between political parties' broadcasts is: 'public opinion polls on vote intention, published througout campaigns on TV will contribute to successive revisions of candidates' discourses. Candidates re-orient their arguments and thematic selections in part by the signals sent by voters. One must also consider the interference of other kinds of input on electoral propaganda such as internal and external political crises and the arbitrary interference of private interests on the dispute. Moments of internal crisis in disputes between candidates might result from the exhaustion of a certain strategy. The moments of exhaustion might consequently precipitate an inversion in the thematic flux.
As demonstrated above, only a good scientific hypothesis can lead to the development of a methodology that will allow the empirical description, be it dynamic or static.

The Process of a Content Analysis

According to Klaus Krippendorff (1980 and 2004), six questions must be addressed in every content analysis:
1) Which data are analyzed?
2) How are they defined?
3) What is the population from which they are drawn?
4) What is the context relative to which the data are analyzed?
5) What are the boundaries of the analysis?
6) What is the target of the inferences?

According to Zipf Law, the assumption is that words and phrases mentioned most often are those reflecting important concerns in every communication. Therefore, quantitative content analysis starts with word frequencies, space measurements (column centimeters in the case of newspapers), time counts (for radio and television time) and keyword frequencies. However, content analysis extends far beyond plain word counts, e.g. with KWIC routines words can be analysed in their specific context to be disambiguated. Synonyms and homonyms can be isolated in accordance to linguistic properties of a language.
Qualitatively it can involve any kind of analysis where communication content (speech, written text, interviews, images ...) is categorized and classified. While on its start with the first newspapers at the end of 19th century, it was done by manually measuring the amount of lines and space e.g. on newspapers. With the rise of common computing facilities like PCs, computer based methods of analysis are growing in popularity. Answers to open ended questions, newspaper articles, political party manifestoes, medical records or systematic observations in experiments can all be subject to systematic analysis of textual data. By having contents of communication available in form of machine readable texts, the input is analysed for frequencies and coded into categories for building up inferences. Weber (1990) notes: "To make valid inferences from the text, it is important that the classification procedure be reliable in the sense of being consistent: Different people should code the same text in the same way" (p. 12). The validity, Inter-coder reliability and Intra-coder reliability are subject to intense methodological research efforts over long years (see Krippendorf, 2004).
One more distinction is between the manifest contents (of communication) and its latent meaning. "Manifest" describes what (an author or speaker) definitely has written, while latent meaning describes what an author intended to say/write. Normally, content analysis can only be applied on manifest contents, that are the words, sentences, texts in general.
A further step in analysis is the distinction between dictionary-based (quantitative) approaches and qualitative approaches. Dictionary-based approaches set up a list of categories derived from the frequency list of words and control the distribution of words and their respective categories over the texts. While methods in quantitative content analysis in this way transform observations of found categories into quantitative statistical data, the qualitative content analysis focuses more on the intentionality and its implications.

References

Bernard Berelson: Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press 1971 (first edition from 1952)
Ian Budge/Hans-Dieter Klingemann et.al.: Mapping Policy Preferences. Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998. Oxford 2001: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0199244006 (great example of application of content analysis methods in Political Science dealing with political parties and its impact on electoral systems).
Klaus Krippendorf: Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2004 (currently the most important book available, first edition was from 1980)
Ole R. Holsti: Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Reading, Mass. 1969
Carl W. Roberts (ed.): Text Analysis for the Social Sciences: Methods for Drawing Inferences from Texts and Transcripts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum 1997
Robert Philip Weber: Basic Content Analysis. 2nd ed., Newbury Park, CA: Sage 1990 (recommended introductory reading)
External links
http://www.car.ua.edu/ (the seemingly most complete web resource on content analysis, with reading list of important publications, list of available software solutions and a mailing list for subscription)
http://www.apb.cwc.net/homepage.htm (HAMLET software implementing routines of Multidimensional Scaling for comparison of similarities/proximities in textual data)
On-line Content Analysis Tool
http://ascweb.usc.edu/ (the Annenberg School of Communications, Los Angeles in the United States)
http://www.essex.ac.uk/methods (the "Essex Summer School for Data Analysis and Data Collection", United Kingdom offers university-level education in social science methodology including content analysis methods).

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