ABSTRACT
Of all the research methods employed in social science, content analysis is by nature the one that is most indispensable and central to communication research. Systematic examination of communication content is central to understanding any effects of content and any of the myriad factors influencing how the content was constructed, factors ranging from individual communicator characteristics to professional values and routines, or to institutional, societal, and ideological forces. As a process that systematically assigns communication content to categories according to rules, and analyzes resulting data for relationships involving those categories using statistical methods, quantitative content analysis has been applied to myriad topics, ranging from misogyny in rap songs, to the “sexualization” of video-game characters, to cultural representation on institutional websites, to protest news coverage, to the “mediatization” of political communication, and to corporate reporting of socially responsible activities, to name a few examples. Scholars beyond the communication field have also used content analysis, discovering that its versatility is limited only by the analyst’s imagination, theory, and resources.
