Content analysis
Content analysis is a method for summarizing any form of content by counting various
aspects of the content. This enables a more objective evaluation than comparing
content based on the impressions of a listener. For example, an impressionistic
summary of a TV program, is not content analysis. Nor is a book review: it’s an
evaluation.
Content analysis, though it often analyses written words, is a quantitative method.
The results of content analysis are numbers and percentages. After doing a content
analysis, you might make a statement such as "27% of programs on Radio Lukole in
April 2003 mentioned at least one aspect of peacebuilding, compared with only 3% of
the programs in 2001."
Though it may seem crude and simplistic to make such statements, the counting
serves two purposes:
to remove much of the subjectivity from summaries
to simplify the detection of trends.
Also, the fact that programs have been counted implies that somebody has listened to
every program on the station: content analysis is always thorough.
As you’ll see below, content analysis can actually be a lot more subtle than the above
example. There’s plenty of scope for human judgement in assigning relevance to
content.
1. What is content?
The content that is analysed can be in any form to begin with, but is often converted
into written words before it is analysed. The original source can be printed
publications, broadcast programs, other recordings, the internet, or live situations. All
this content is something that people have created. You can’t do content analysis of
(say) the weather - but if somebody writes a report predicting the weather, you can
do a content analysis of that.
All this is content...
Print media Newspaper items, magazine articles, books,
catalogues
Other writings Web pages, advertisements, billboards,
posters, graffiti
Broadcast media Radio programs, news items, TV programs
Other recordings Photos, drawings, videos, films, music
Live situations Speeches, interviews, plays, concerts
Observations Gestures, rooms, products in shops
Media content and audience content
That’s one way of looking at content. Another way is to divide content into two types:
media content and audience content. Just about everything in the above list is media
content. But when you get feedback from audience members, that’s audience
content. Audience content can be either private or public. Private audience content
includes:
open-ended questions in surveys
interview transcripts
group discussions.
Public audience content comes from communication between all the audience
members, such as:
letters to the editor
postings to an online discussion forum
listeners’ responses in talkback radio.
The analysis of private audience content, in verbal form, is covered in chapter 12, on
depth interviews. Therefore this chapter will focus mainly on public audience content
and on media content.
Why do content analysis?
If you’re also doing audience research, the main reason for also doing content analysis
is to be able to make links between causes (e.g. program content) and effect (e.g.
audience size). If you do an audience survey, but you don’t systematically relate the
survey findings to your program output, you won’t know why your audience might have
increased or decreased. You might guess, when the survey results first appear, but a
thorough content analysis is much better than a guess.
For a media organization, the main purpose of content analysis is to evaluate and
improve its programming. All media organizations are trying to achieve some purpose.
For commercial media, the purpose is simple: to make money, and survive. For public
and community-owned media, there are usually several purposes, sometimes
conflicting - but each individual program tends to have one main purpose.
As a simple commercial example, the purpose of an advertisement is to promote the
use of the product it is advertising: first by increasing awareness, then by increasing
sales. The purpose of a documentary on AIDS in southern Africa might be to increase
awareness of ways of preventing AIDS, and in the end to reduce the level of AIDS.
Often, as this example has shown, there is not a single purpose, but a chain of them,
with each step leading to the next.
Using audience research to evaluate the effects (or outcome) of a media project is the
second half of the process. The first half is to measure the causes (or inputs) - and
that is done by content analysis. For example, in the 1970s a lot of research was done
on the effects of broadcasting violence on TV. If people saw crimes committed on TV,
did that make them more likely to commit crimes? In this case, the effects were crime
rates, often measured from police statistics. The problem was to link the effects to
the possible causes. The question was not simply "does seeing crime on TV make
people commit crimes?" but "What types of crime on TV (if any) make what types of
people (if any) commit crimes, in what situations?" UNESCO in the 1970s produced a
report summarizing about 3,000 separate studies of this issue - and most of those
studies used some form of content analysis.
When you study causes and effects, as in the above example, you can see how content
analysis differs from audience research:
content analysis uncovers causes
audience research uncovers effects.
The entire process - linking causes to effects, is known as evaluation.
