Content Analysis
A systematic technique for categorizing, and often counting, features of texts or media in order to describe their content.
Content analysis is a systematic technique for describing the content of texts, images, or media by sorting it into predefined or emergent categories. In its quantitative form, the researcher counts how often categories occur, which supports comparison across sources or time periods. Qualitative content analysis focuses instead on interpreting meaning within categories. Either way, the method relies on clear category definitions and consistent application, often checked through inter-rater reliability.
In a thesis, content analysis suits questions about what appears in a body of material, such as policy documents, news coverage, or social media posts. Its structured categories and countable results make the analysis easy to audit, but you must justify your coding scheme and your sampling of texts so readers can judge whether the categories fairly represent the material.
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