What is Content Analysis?

Last time, we looked at the method of thematic analysis.

To conduct thematic analysis:

First, a researcher converts their data into written form. 

Second, they familiarise themselves with the data. 

Third, they label the data using codes. 

Fourth, they categorise their codes into themes. 

And, finally, they write a report interpreting their themes, and relating them back to the research topic. 

So: thematic analysis is one way of analysing qualitative data. 

A second type of qualitative data analysis is called content analysis. 

For instance: Iris’ colleague Isla wants to carry out content analysis on Iris’ data about how people’s lives change after a brain injury. 

Isla decides ahead of time that she wants to look for instances of anxiety, forgetting, and difficulty focusing. 

Next, Isla listens to the audio recordings of the interview, and counts up how many times the participants comment on each of these categories.

For instance, when she hears a participant say “I keep struggling to remember where I’ve put my keys”, she’ll add one to the forgetting row. 

And if she hears a participant say “I feel anxious about starting work again…”, she’ll add one to the anxiety row. 

And we call this method content analysis

Now, there are four key differences between content analysis and thematic analysis.

First, if researchers are conducting thematic analysis, researchers must put their data in written form

Whereas, if they are conducting content analysis, researchers can use written data, but they can also use other forms of data, like audio recordings.

Second, in thematic analysis…

In thematic analysis, researchers label their data using codes, and then categorise their codes into themes. 

Whereas, in content analysis, we call these categories coding units. And content analysis involves counting up instances of each coding unit….which is actually easy to remember, because ‘count’ is hidden in the term ‘coding unit’. 

Third, we saw that, when conducting thematic analysis, Iris read through her data over and over again….and she came up with her codes only once she was very familiar with her data.

On the other hand, when conducting content analysis, Isla…

When conducting content analysis, Isla came up with her coding units before she went through her data even once!

Fourth and finally, when Iris conducted thematic analysis, she wrote a report with an interpretation of the themes in her data. 

Whereas, when Isla conducted content analysis, she ended up with a count of the number of times each coding unit appeared, which is…

When Isla conducted content analysis, she ended up with a count of the number of times each coding unit appeared, which is quantitative, nominal data. 

To sum up, content analysis involves a researcher establishing coding units before they look through their qualitative data. 

They then go through the data and count up the number of times each coding unit appears in the data.

As a result, the qualitative data is turned into quantitative, nominal data!

And, unlike thematic analysis content analysis can be done on any form of qualitative data!