Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Content analysis is a highly flexible research method that has been widely used in library and information science (LIS) studies with varying research goals and objectives. The research method is applied in qualitative, quantitative, and sometimes mixed modes of research frameworks and employs a wide range of analytical techniques to generate findings and put them into context. This article characterizes content analysis as a systematic, rigorous approach to analyzing documents obtained or generated in the course of research. It briefly describes the steps involved in content analysis, differentiates between quantitative and qualitative content analysis, and shows that content analysis serves the purposes of both quantitative research and qualitative research. The authors draw on selected LIS studies that have used content analysis to illustrate the concepts addressed in the article. The article also serves as a gateway to methodological books and articles that provide more detail about aspects of content analysis discussed only briefly in the article.
INTRODUCTION
As a research methodology, content analysis has its roots in the study of mass communications in the 1950s.1 Based on a basic communications model of sender / message / receiver, initially researchers emphasized making inferences based on quantified analysis of recurring, easily identifiable aspects of text content, sometimes referred to as manifest content. Since then, researchers in many fields, including anthropology, library and information studies (LIS), management, political science, psychology, and sociology, have used content analysis. In the process, they have adapted content analysis to suit the unique needs of their research questions and strategies and have developed a cluster of techniques and approaches for analyzing text grouped under the broad term of textual analysis. A significant change has been a broadening of text aspects to include syntactic, syntagmatic, and pragmatic aspects of text, although not always within the same study. Merten (as cited by Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000) notes that "the range of procedures in content analysis is enormous, in terms of both analytical goals and the means or processes developed to pursue them" (p. 55). The variants include, for example, besides content analysis, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, ethnographic analysis, functional pragmatics, rhetorical analysis, and narrative semiotics.2 Although these approaches are alike in their reliance on communicative material as the raw material for...