Coding and content analysis

This masks some other important features of content analysis, including, for example, examination of the interconnectedness of units of analysis (categories), the emergent nature of themes and the testing, development and generation of theory. Flick (2009: 326) summarizes several stages of content analysis:

defining the units of analysis;OO paraphrasing the relevant passages of text;OO defining the level of abstraction required of the OO paraphrasing; data reduction and deletion (e.g. removing para­OO phrases that duplicate meaning); data reduction by combing and integrating para­OO phrases at the level of abstraction required; putting together the new statements into a category OO system; reviewing the new category system against the orig­OO inal data.