ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the minimal definition of content analysis that covers a wide range of concrete research agendas. The completion of this thought, specifying what, beyond the minimal requirement of systematic procedures, must be included among the defining criteria of content analysis, takes diverse forms for different authors, and much of this chapter is devoted to mapping the alternatives. In a methodologically similar, if simpler, vein, Bergesen and Jones code shifts in dance choreography in New York. Dance, exhibits a trend toward a minimal choreography from 1945 to the late 1960s. The work of Karen Cerulo deals with musical and visual materials in a radically different fashion. Stone, in emphasizing inference as the proper goal of content analysis, rejected the idea that content analysis should be devoted to “mere” measurement on the grounds that its results would hardly be worth reading; only if inferences are made to some interesting characteristics of people, social behavior is the exercise worth the candle.
