Content Analysis Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Content Analysis Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Content analysis refers to a method for classifying textual material that involves reducing it to more manageable, categorical, or quantitative data for use in comparative analysis. The basic goal of content analysis is to apply a set of explicit procedures to the analysis of texts to make systematic inferences possible about the text, the authors, or the intended recipients of the text. Content analysis differs from discourse analysis in that the latter typically focuses more on the qualitative interpretation of the meaning of language in texts, paying special attention to how context and conventions are represented through language. While text typically refers to written documents, it applies quite generally to recorded verbal behavior of almost any kind. Commonly analyzed examples include political speeches, media broadcasts, newspaper editorials, court decisions, business reports, psychological diaries, draft legislation, correspondence with companies, and the transcripts of customer service phone calls.

Content analysis is commonly used in the study of politics, media, business, law, psychology, and public administration. For instance, a political scientist might be interested in analyzing the policy positions of political parties and would turn to content analysis of the official political programs, known as manifestos, published by the parties. In fact, the long-standing Comparative Manifesto Project does just this, unitizing party manifestos into discrete quasi-sentence units and then assigning each quasi sentence a policy category from a predefined, fifty-six-category coding scheme.

Bibliography:

Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, 2004.
Weber, Robert Philip. Basic Content Analysis, 2nd ed.Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, 1990.