Berg goes on to suggest that content analysis has been used in many different disciplines, including psychology, education, business, sociology, political science, art, and others, and that it is “chiefly a coding operation and data interpretation process” (p. It is in this type of analysis that the most striking differences between quantitative and qualitative approaches can be seen.Īccording to Berg (2009), content analysis is a “careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings” (p. Although this is not the only technique for textual analysis, it is a major one. Content analysis provides a way to do this. This content-whether transcripts from focus groups, interviews, oral histories, or videotaped storytelling sessions-has to be “decoded” so it can be summarized and understood by others.
If the data collection method involves the collection of textual content, it has to be analyzed and made sense of in some way in order to be useful. Valeda Dent Goodman, in Qualitative Research and the Modern Library, 2011 A little bit about analyzing the data