Content analysis

Content analysis is "a wide and heterogeneous set of manual or computer-assisted techniques for contextualized interpretations of documents produced by communication processes in the strict sense of that phrase (any kind of text, written, iconic, multimedia, etc.) or signification processes (traces and artifacts), having as ultimate goal the production of valid and trustworthy inferences".

Content analysis has come to be a sort of 'umbrella term' referring to an almost boundless set of quite diverse research approaches and techniques. Broadly, it can refer to methods for studying and/or retrieving meaningful information from documents. In a more focused way, content analysis refers to a family of techniques for studying the "mute evidence" of texts and artifacts. There are five types of texts in content analysis:

Content analysis can also be described as studying traces, which are documents from past times, and artifacts, which are non-linguistic documents. Texts are understood to be produced by communication processes in a broad sense of that phrase—often gaining mean through abduction.

Despite the wide variety of options, generally speaking every "content analysis" method implies a series of transformation procedures, equipped with a different degree of formalization depending on the type of technique used, but which share the scientific re-elaboration of the object examined. This means, in short, guaranteeing the repeatability of the method, i.e.: that preset itinerary which, following pre-established techniques produced those results. This path changes consistently depending on the direction imprinted by the interpretative key of the researcher who, at the end of the day, is responsible for the operational decisions made.

Over the years, content analysis has been applied to a variety of scopes. Hermeneutics and philology have been using content analysis since the dawn of time to interpret sacred and profane texts and, in not a few cases, to attribute texts' authorship and authenticity.

In recent times, particularly with the advent of mass communication, content analysis has known an increasing use to deeply analyse and understand media content and media logic. The political scientist Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis in its early-mid 20th-century mainstream version: "Who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?". The strong emphasis for a quantitative approach started up by Lasswell was finally carried out by another "father" of content analysis, Bernard Berelson, who proposed a definition of content analysis which, from this point of view, is emblematic: "a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication".

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Wikipedia