ABSTRACT
The term content analysis broadly describes a wide-ranging and diverse domain of techniques designed to describe and explicate a communication or series of communications in a systematic, objective, and quantitative manner. In many ways, the data of most common types of content analyses resemble those obtained in open-ended, exploratory interviews. The exploratory interview imposes no restraints on the questions of the interviewer or the allowable responses of the participant. The researcher has little or no control over the stimuli giving rise to the specific response or the particular form in which the response is framed. Similarly, in most content analyses, the investigator is concerned with a communication that (a) was not elicited by some systematic set of questions chosen by the analyst, (b) probably does not contain all the information he or she would like it to contain, and (c) is almost invariably stated in a manner not easily codified and analyzed. In both research contexts, the interview or content analysis, the investigator must transform these qualitative unstructured messages into useful data for scientific, quantitative analysis.
