Case Studies and Content Analysis

Question 1

What is content analysis?

Answer 1

-type of observational research in which people are studied indirectly via the communications they have produced

Question 2

What are the forms of communication?

Answer 2

-spoken interaction, written, examples from the media

Question 3

What is the aim of content analysis?

Answer 3

-to summarise and describe this communication in a systematic way

Question 4

How do you complete a content analysis?

Answer 4

1. identify important categories
2. work through data and count number of occurrences
3. check through data again to double check each category has been noted

Question 5

What is coding?

Answer 5

-initial stage of content analysis
-some data sets may very large - and need to categorise into meaningful units

Question 6

What is thematic analysis?

Answer 6

-form of content analysis but the outcome is qualitative
-involves identification of themes (recurrent)
-likely to be more descriptive
-may collect new data to find validity of themes