Content analysis of the text. Method and its description

Content analysis is necessary in order to reveal in the content of documents certain interesting trends and facts of interest to the reader. Studying the content of documents in their social context, the analysis can be of different focus (political, analysis of periodicals, survey results) and can be used in any areas of social activity as the main research method. In addition, in the process of research, the content analysis method can also be auxiliary, parallel, control.

Content-analysis of texts adheres to certain principles:
1. The principle of formalization.

The text under analysis contains unambiguous rules that fix specific characteristics.

2. The principle of statistical significance.

Significant in the text for content analysis elements should not be single. To confidently build on these or other characteristics, they need to be repeated often enough in the texts.

Often, content analysis has a social focus, and in these cases, media reports, business documents, the contents of various interviews, letters, answers to questions from the survey become objects of research. These studies are conducted in order to identify the phenomena and factors that contributed to the creation of these texts and affected their content and the characteristics of some text elements: the structure, language style, tones and rhythms of communication, and the impact of texts on recipients. This method of content analysis of the text also helps to identify the personal characteristics of the author and occurs in several stages:

1. Formulation of problems, themes and hypotheses of research.
2. Definition of categories for analysis:

- The study is divided into several important points, which contain the most important questions that require identification in texts (values, sign, goals, the hero, the theme, the genre of the text and its author);

- content analysis of the media has its own peculiar system of categories: the essence of the problem, the reasons that contribute to its emergence, the subjects of the problems under consideration, the general tension of the situation, the solutions to this problem.

For a qualitative and accurate analysis, its categories should be exhaustive (the coverage of the entire study), mutually exclusive (the text element belongs to only one category), reliable (the text element is categorized into a category agreed with all researchers) relevant (categories correspond to the content of the text).

Content analysis begins with the choice of units of analysis (sentence, word, topic, judgment, the message itself). These units are examined with objective text on the background of large text elements, for example, if a word is selected, then this element becomes a sentence.

Then the account unit is set. This unit can be the time of broadcasting of this message in the media, the number of lines in the text, the number of searchable features in the text.

An important problem in content analysis is the sampling of the analyzed sources. The main tasks in this situation are reduced to the choice of source, the number of texts on this topic and the date they were written, the research topic.

Typically, the content analysis covers the sample of the text for the year, for example: minutes of meetings - 12 protocols, media reports - 12-16 numbers of periodicals (days of broadcasting). That is, the content analysis of the media can contain from 200 to 600 texts.

Further, all analyzed data is reduced to the main document, in the content analysis table. The compilation of these tables depends on the sampling and the stage in which the study is located.

For example, when determining the category of analysis, the table resembles a questionnaire with a question (category) and variants of answers to it (signs). In determining the same units of analysis, a coding matrix is created (for large studies, a matrix copy, for small ones (no more than 100 units) - each text has its own matrix).