Content Analysis

A constant goal of sociologists and other socialscience researchers is to determine objective, or relatively objective, ways of measuring something that is inherently very far from "objective," namely human (individual or social) attitudes and actions. One such technique is content analysis, or the use of statistical methods to analyse the contents of documents usually written documents of one sort or another, though transcripts of speech, television shows, and other nonpaper "documents" can also be subjected to content analysis. In the simplest instance, content analysis may be performed by counting and tabulating the occurence of particular words in a document. If, for example, a given document has frequent references to "God," "Christ," and "salvation," as compared to other documents, we might reasonably infer that the document is somehow concerned with Christian religion. If it also has frequent references to "Virgin Mary," this would be some evidence of a Catholic orientation; references to "born again," in contrast, would indicate an evangelical Protestant orientation. Such an analysis does not tell us everything the document may in fact be a passionate attack on the beliefs associated with these words, but it is strong evidence that the document's writer or intended readers were concerned with these beliefs.

As another illustration of content analysis, we may actually perform a simple content analysis, taken here from Bailey (1987: 300302).

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er eighteenthcentury source, a newspaper reporting on the ratification fight over the U.S. Constitution, entertained its readers and prefigured the Gingrich list by counting the appearance of certain words and phrases in antiFederalist texts, suggesting to its readers that they, too, could produce an antiFederalist diatribe by liberally using these same words andphrases (Krippendorff, 1980: 14). Content analysis only came into its own in the twentieth century, however, with the rise of masscirculation newspapers, and a corresponding interest among socialscience researchers into character and biases of newspaper coverage. It was realized that one way of analysing that character and bias was by objective analysis of the coverage the number of columninches of coverage given to various topics, for example, or the relative space given to Democratic and Republican candidates, or the number of favorable or unfavorable mentions of such candidates, and so forth. Since World War II, the use of content analysis has become more popular and widespread, partly because of our increased awareness of the propagandistic uses of language, and partly because computer technology has made many forms of content analys

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