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Methodologies

Content Analysis

Not all analyses of contents are conventionally called "Content Analysis" (CA). Rather, Content Analysis usually only refers to so-called quantitative techniques. These encompass, but are not limited to, frequency counts, concordances, collocation measurements, and a number of clustering techniques for strings and/or codes derived from textual, audial or visual data, sometimes also called "text mining" or "data mining". Content Analysis is also associated with dictionary based analyses of textual data, whereby the distribution of concepts is measured by the distribution of (lemmatized) words in a given text.

Some scholars also speak of "Qualitative Content Analysis" (QCA). In the Fifties, qualitative content analysis merely meant all analytical approaches to textual, audial or video contents, which did not rely on statistical techniques: Contemporary Discourse Analysis, and other more qualitative methods would qualify as "qualitative content analysis" from this point of view. However, today, Qualitative Content Analysis mainly means the interpretive coding of data. The resulting codes can then, of course, be analyzed in quantitative fashion.

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Content Analysis

Qualitative Content Analysis

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