Content Analysis

A methodology in he social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "The Study of recorded human communication, such as book, websites, paintings and law". It is most commonly used by researchers in the social sciences to analyse recorded transcripts of interviewers with participants.

The techniques basically involves summarizing and qualitative analysis of messages that rely on the scientific method (including objectivity, inter-subjectivity, apriori design, reliability, validity, generalizability and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the context in which the message are created or presented. It is often involves building and applying a 'concept dictionary' or fixed vocabulary of terms on the basis of which words are extracted from the textual data for concording or statistical computation.