Content Analysis

This form of analysis entails searching for the presence and frequency of certain words or phrases within any specific text (i.e. interview transcripts or literature), and attempts to qualify reasons for their presence. This can be done in a number of ways, and there are two main methods that fall within this broad category of content analysis.

Conceptual Analysis (Also known as Thematic Analysis)

This entails the identification of concepts in the text. Rather than identifying specific words as such, concept analysis allows you to search for groups of words as they relate to a specific meaning or concept. For example, the concept of 'loneliness; may be expressed in a number of different ways e.g. alone, isolated, lonely, by myself, without others etc. Conceptual analysis allows you to look at all content related to this concept or theme, tally the frequency of its occurrence and draw meaning from that. Remember to also look for contradictions, theoretical connections, other sorts of arguments and ideas. If you have a large amount of data, software such as NUDIST and others will enable you to code your data in various helpful ways.

Click on the link below to read more about how to conduct conceptual analysis.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/research/content/pop3b.cfm

Relational Analysis

This is similar to conceptual analysis in that you seek to identify the presence of certain concepts that reoccur within your data. Relational analysis however goes one step beyond the identifying of concepts, and attempts to find meaningful relationships between the occurrence of multiple concepts. For example, how does the concept of 'loneliness' relate to the concept of 'isolation'.

Click on the link below for more information on conducting relational analysis.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/research/content/pop3f.cfm

Content analysis requires the researcher to 'code' data. This means that the researcher would have a pre-existing set of concepts or themes, and that data found to be related to that concept would be 'coded' or stored in a way that would signal what concept it specifically related to.

Coding of data in this way is a deductive approach to analysis, as the research is used to test the data against existing theories and/or concepts.

Examples:

Maori Provider Success  Fiona Cram 
 A research ethic for studying Māori and Iwi Provider Success
(This PDF is accessed via the Ministry of Social develoment website)

Further Reading:

Weber, Robert (1990), 'Basic Content Analysis', California: Thousand Oaks Sage Publications.

Krripendorff, Klaus (2004), 'Content Analysis: An Introduction to its methodology', Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.