At a top level, content analysis in research allows you to examine and understand the content of textual data. There are two types of methodological approaches to content analysis: quantitative content analysis and qualitative content analysis.
The term “qualitative content analysis” can be misleading because it often uses many quantitative elements. For this reason, it is helpful to clearly define each approach to show where this overlap in qualitative content analysis occurs.
What is quantitative content analysis?
- Quantitative content analysis is a research method that systematically measures the presence and frequency of specific words, phrases, or themes in a large sample of texts. It uses a numbers-based method to identify patterns that can answer “how much”, “how many” or “how often”. That is to say that the process is purely empirical.
What is qualitative content analysis?
- Qualitative content analysis answers “why”, “how”, or “what”. Through an iterative process of coding, counting, and interpretation, it explores the subtleties of data in a way the quantitative method does not. That said, qualitative content analysis often relies on quantifying the frequency of words, phrases, and concepts to provide such answers.