Content analysis is necessary in order to identify certain trends and facts in the content of documents that interest the reader. Studying the content of documents in their social context, the analysis can be of different directions (political, periodical analysis, questionnaire results) and can be used in any areas of social activity as the main research method. In addition, in the research process, the content analysis method can also be auxiliary, parallel, control.
Content analysis of texts adheres to some principles:
1. The principle of formalization.
The text being analyzed contains unambiguous rules that reinforce specific characteristics.
2. The principle of statistical significance.
Elements that are significant in the text for content analysis should not be single. To confidently build on certain signs, they need to be repeated often enough in the texts.
Often, content analysis is socially oriented, and in these cases, media reports, business documents, the contents of various interviews, letters, answers to questions from the questionnaire become objects for research. These studies are conducted in order to identify the phenomena and factors that contributed to the creation of these texts and influenced their content and the characteristics of some text elements: structure, language style, communication tones and rhythms, assessment of the impact of texts on recipients. This method of text content analysis also helps to identify the personal characteristics of the author and occurs in several stages:
- Formulation of tasks, topics and research hypotheses.
- Definition of categories for analysis:
- the study is divided into several important points, in which there are the most important issues that need to be identified in the texts (values, sign, goals, hero, theme, genre of the text and its author);
- content analysis of the media has its own peculiar system of categories: the essence of the problem, the reasons contributing to its occurrence, the subjects of the problems under consideration, the general tension of the current situation, and options for solving this problem.
For a qualitative and accurate analysis, its categories should be comprehensive (coverage of the entire study), mutually exclusive (the text element belongs to only one category), reliable (the binding of the text element to the category is agreed with all researchers), appropriate (the categories correspond to the content of the text).
Content analysis begins with the choice of units of analysis (sentence, word, topic, proposition, message itself). An objective study of these units is considered against the background of large text elements, for example, if a word is selected, then the sentence becomes this element.
Then the unit of account is set. This unit may be the broadcast time of a given message in the media, the number of lines in the text, the number of required attributes in the text.
An important problem in content analysis is the selection of the analyzed sources. The main tasks in this situation are reduced to the choice of source, the number of texts on this topic and the date of their writing, the topic of the study.
Typically, content analysis covers a sample of text for a year, for example: meeting minutes - 12 minutes, media reports - 12-16 periodicals (air days). That is, the media content analysis can contain from 200 to 600 texts.
Further, all the analyzed data is summarized in the main document, in the table of content analysis. The compilation of these tables depends on the features of the sample and the stage at which the study is located.
For example, when determining the category of analysis, the table resembles a questionnaire with a question (category) and answers to it (signs). When determining the units of analysis, a coding matrix is created (for large studies - a notebook of matrices, for small studies (no more than 100 units) - each text has its own matrix).
