Just as with all measurement, however, you should be sure to attempt to estimate the reliability and validity of the measures. For instance, collecting radio station preferences at two different time periods and correlating the results might be useful for assessing test-retest reliability. Content Analysis Content analysis is the analysis of text documents. The analysis can be quantitative, qualitative or both. Typically, the major purpose of content analysis is to identify patterns in text.
Content analysis is an extremely broad area of research.
The identification of themes or major ideas in a document or set of documents. The documents can be any kind of text including field notes, newspaper articles, technical papers or organizational memos. There are a wide variety of automated methods for rapidly indexing text documents. A computer program scans the text and indexes all key words. A key word is any term in the text that is not included in an exception dictionary.