Content analysis is necessary in order to identifyin the content of documents of interest to the reader certain trends and facts. Studying the content of documents in their social context, the analysis can be of different focus (political, analysis of periodicals, survey results) and can be used in any areas of social activity as the main research method. In addition, in the process of research, the content analysis method can also be auxiliary, parallel, control.
Content-analysis of texts adheres to certain principles:
1. The principle of formalization.
The text under analysis contains unambiguous rules that fix specific characteristics.
2. The principle of statistical significance.
Significant in the text for content analysis elements should not be single. To confidently build on these or other characteristics, they need to be repeated often enough in the texts.
Often, content analysis has a socialorientation, and in these cases, media reports, business documentation, the content of various interviews, letters, answers to questions from the questionnaire become objects of research. These studies are conducted in order to identify the phenomena and factors that contributed to the creation of these texts and influenced their content and the characteristics of some text elements: the structure, language style, tones and rhythms of communication, and the impact of texts on recipients. This method of content analysis of the text also helps to identify the personal characteristics of the author and occurs in several stages:
- the study is divided into several important points, which contain the most important questions that need to be identified in the texts (values, sign, goals, the hero, the theme, the genre of the text and its author);
- content analysis of the media has its own peculiara system of categories: the essence of the problem, the causes that contribute to its emergence, the subjects of the problems under consideration, the general tension of the situation, the options for solving this problem.
Для качественного и точного анализа его категории should be exhaustive (the coverage of the entire study), mutually exclusive (the text element belongs to only one category), reliable (the binding of the text element to the category is coordinated with all researchers), relevant (categories correspond to the content of the text).
Content analysis begins with the choice of units of analysis(sentence, word, subject, judgment, message itself). These units are examined in objective research against the background of large text elements, for example, if a word is chosen, then this element becomes a sentence.
Then the account unit is set. This unit can be the time of broadcasting of this message in the media, the number of lines in the text, the number of searchable features in the text.
An important problem with content analysis issample of analyzed sources. The main tasks in this situation are reduced to the choice of source, the number of texts on this topic and the date of their writing, the research topic.
Usually content analysis covers the selection of textfor a year, for example: minutes of meetings - 12 protocols, media reports - 12-16 numbers of periodicals (days of broadcasting). That is, the content analysis of the media can contain from 200 to 600 texts.
Further, all analyzed data is reduced to the main document, in the content analysis table. The compilation of these tables depends on the sampling and the stage in which the study is located.
For example, when defining an analysis categorythe table resembles a questionnaire with a question (category) and variants of answers to it (signs). In determining the same units of analysis, a coding matrix is created (for large studies, a matrix notebook, for small ones (no more than 100 units), each text has its own matrix).
