Textual Analysis or Content Analysis (edited)

Textual analysis or Content analysis is a methodology in the social

sciences for studying the content of communication.

Earl Babbie defines it as "The study of recorded human communications,

such as books, websites, paintings and laws."

Kimberly A. Neuendorf (2002) offers a six-part definition of content

analysis:
"Content analysis is a summarising, quantitative analysis of messages that
relies on the scientific method (including attention to objectivity,
intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability,validity, generalisability,
replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of
variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are
created or presented."

The method of content analysis enables the researcher to include large

amounts of textual information and systematically identify its properties,
e.g. the frequencies of most used keywords (KWIC meaning "Key Word
in Context") by locating the more important structures of its
communication content. Yet such amounts of textual information must be
categorised analysis, providing at the end a meaningful reading of content
under scrutiny.

Uses of content analysis

Ole Holsti (1969) groups 15 uses of content analysis into three basic
categories:
• make inferences about the antecedents of a communication
• describe and make inferences about characteristics of a communication
• make inferences about the effects of a communication.

The process of a content analysis

According to Dr. Klaus Krippendorff(1980 and 2004), six questions must
be addressed in every
content analysis:
1. Which data are analysed?
2. How are they defined?
3. What is the population from which they are drawn?
4. What is the context relative to which the data are analysed?
5. What are the boundaries of the analysis?
6. What is the target of the inferences?
Reliability in content analysis

Dr. Kimberly A. Neuendorf (2002) suggests that when human coders are
used in content analysis, reliability translates to intercoder reliability or
"the amount of agreement or correspondence among
two or more coders."