November 25, 2008
[Content Analysis]
Content Analysis is one of the basics of qualitative research. While the concept is really simple, it was sort of fun to master over the summer at my job. Let’s dive in, shal we?
So, you send out a survey about the season of winter. You ask all sorts of questions about snow, the holidays, and hot chocolate, some with rating scales, some multiple choice, and some fill in the blank. One of your fill in the blank questions is “What is your favorite childhood memory during winter?” You get many different responses, but after a while you start to recognize similarities in the responses. Content analysis is a way to place these answers into categories, to enable you to run statistics and compare the responses, just as if it were a multiple choice question.
PROS: Content Analysis gives your survey responders a chance to speak their minds. They can fill in whatever they’d like and really be honest about their answer. Questions that require content analysis allow responders to surprise you with their answers. This type of answer, ones that the researcher couldn’t come up with on their own, are the responses they are looking for. Also, the researcher who completes content analysis feels emerged in the responders’ culture after reading response after response. It is a great way to get a sense for who you’re talking to.
CONS: Content Analysis takes a lot of time. Even when working diligently, the work itself just takes time. It also is inherently contradictory. The goal is to encourage unique responses, but ultimately each response gets put into a category, as if it were a multiple choice question. I suggest presenting the work of content analysis with a few representative responses with each category so that the feeling of the responses aren’t lost.
