Content analysis has been defined in many different ways but the essence of them is that content analysis is en empirical scientific method used to draw conslusions abut the conten in different kinds of communication such as interviews, observation protocols or articles .

Its roots can be traced back to the 17th century and the inqusitorial pursuits of the church. In the beginning of the last century content analysis was used for analysis of newspaper and those analysis were quantitative. Later, during the second world war  it was used for analysis of propaganda, also this quantitative.

From that the use of content analysis spread to other disciplines and evolved towards qualitative analysis. Krippendorff question the usefulness of the distinction between qualitative and quantitative content analysis stating that all reading of texts is qualitative, even if you later convert the content into numbers and count them.

The answer to your answer will accordingly be Yes! you can use qualitative content analysis to analyse your interviews. Without using any statistics. But you might as well use quantitaive content analysis. Which kind you choose depends on your research question.

I can recommend you to read the following book:

Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Good luck with your analysis!

Åsa

Thank you Akkur!

The distinction between qualitative and quantitative depends on the extent to which you are going to count the codes and treat those counts as quantitative data. That approach is much more common in some fields (e.g., communications research) than in others.

Dear,

Already have great answers. Contributing,

I think a good starting point is related to the type of responses you want: objective or discursive. This may assist in the choice .

Greetings!

Using this particular method in a web context and having used it before in analog media I can say it's a classic quantitative technique. Practically you count everything under your eyelashes or your fingertips, height, width, number of columns, words, pictures, sizes, etc etc. Add a cultural twist and you are out there measuring "softer" features such as colors, lines, shapes, verbal and nonverbal elements linked to preferences, traditions and acceptability within different groups of people.  But generally you have a yardstick in your hand and measure, measure, measure.

Content analysis has been defined in many different ways but the essence of them is that content analysis is en empirical scientific method used to draw conslusions abut the conten in different kinds of communication such as interviews, observation protocols or articles .

Its roots can be traced back to the 17th century and the inqusitorial pursuits of the church. In the beginning of the last century content analysis was used for analysis of newspaper and those analysis were quantitative. Later, during the second world war  it was used for analysis of propaganda, also this quantitative.

From that the use of content analysis spread to other disciplines and evolved towards qualitative analysis. Krippendorff question the usefulness of the distinction between qualitative and quantitative content analysis stating that all reading of texts is qualitative, even if you later convert the content into numbers and count them.

The answer to your answer will accordingly be Yes! you can use qualitative content analysis to analyse your interviews. Without using any statistics. But you might as well use quantitaive content analysis. Which kind you choose depends on your research question.

I can recommend you to read the following book:

Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Good luck with your analysis!

Åsa

Thank you all for your useful comments! Much appreciated!

Dear Andreas,

Many times in social science (especially in rural sociology) we use qualitative content analysis to analyse our interviews and our results of focus groups.

Thank you Petros. Yes, indeed. Content analysis is often used to analyse interviews (semi-structured or unstructured) in social sciences. However, as a result from the previous comments and personal research, content analysis may be qualitative or/and quantitative (mixed-methods). As David L Morgan indicated "The distinction between qualitative and quantitative depends on the extent to which you are going to count the codes and treat those counts as quantitative data". In addition, there are useful professional softwares for Qualitative & Mixed Methods Research, like MAXQDA (http://www.maxqda.com/products/maxqda).

http://www.maxqda.com/products/maxqda

Hi Andreas,

Others have given you some excellent answers.  I would add something a bit tangential but it might be helpful....M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan have worked in the area of Systemic-Functional Linguistics which employed both linguistic terms and grammatical constructions to conversational samples and to interviews to get a perspective on how linguistic constructions and language use reflects attitudes and opinions.  It is a descriptive linguistic perspective that also using the grammatical/lexical content for functional analysis. This may be of interest to you.

Much appreciated Jack. 

As you have already discovered, content analysis can be both quantitative and/or qualitative. It is interesting that your first thought was qual, because my first thought was quan. After many years employing this method, I can tell you it all depends on your approach, data collection, and how you write up the results. 

It should be noted that there are different terms that have also been employed to describe the precise method being used. A semiologist might engage in a qualitative textual analysis; whereas a media industries scholar might employ a quantitative content analysis -- but arguably they are both clearly analyzing media texts. 

Different writers have different definitions. Kimberly Neuendorf has written a bit about the different terms and how people define things. And also there are books taking on the quan and qual aspects of the method: 

Neuendorf, K. A. (2002). The content analysis guidebook. Sage.

Riff, D., Lacy, S., & Fico, F. (2014). Analyzing media messages: Using quantitative content analysis in research. Routledge.

Schreier, M. (2012). Qualitative content analysis in practice. Sage Publications.

Bradley C. Freeman interesting answer. My first thought was that content analysis is more a qualitative method for the reason that several researchers deal with it as such. For example:  In a study I recently read the researchers used focus groups (1st phase) and questionnaires (2nd phase) to collect the primary data. Their goal was to obtain information through focus groups and then build the questionnaire based on that information thus combining qualitative and quantitative research. However they don't clarify what tool they used to analyze focus groups. Moreover they didn't use any numbers or counts to describe the results of focus groups. They just use words like "many", "most of them" etc to describe these results. So my question is "what tool these researchers may have used to analyze focus groups?". Could it be qualitative content analysis?

Qualitative researchers, just like everyone else, make comparative statements using language like many and most (a point that has been noted many times in the literature). I don't think this is due to using qualitative content analysis, since it occurs in almost every kind of qualitative analysis that I know.

As for whether all content analysis is always qualitative, some researchers certainly go to great lengths to make it as objective as possible, by using predefined codebooks and insisting on high inter-rater reliability.

Thank you David!

CA can be used both as a quad and a qual method. Here are examples from my own research. Happy to talk more.

Conference Paper Framing analysis as a tool in dissemination research: A cont...

Article Finding Motivation: Online Information Seeking Following New...

Thank you very much Yulia.

When do we use inferred statistics

Es una división más pedagógica que real. Todo va a depender del objetivo del trabajo...

Hi Andreas,

Perhaps the following link will be useful:

https://books.google.com/books?id=335ZDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=creswell+qualitative&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtqIuO5dfcAhVFOK0KHcQPBP8QuwUILTAA#v=onepage&q=creswell%20qualitative&f=false

Have a great day!

--Adrian

Hi Andreas,

Here's another that you might find interesting:

https://books.google.com/books?id=FixGDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=content+analysis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXu7738dfcAhVFi1kKHRTQAk8QuwUILDAA#v=onepage&q=content%20analysis&f=false

Have a great day!

--Adrian

Kindly refer to my paper as an example for adopting content analysis qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

Article Investigating elective courses in architectural education

Hi All,

Could I get some advice on this?

I recently coded some answers from two open-ended questions that I have asked in a questionnaire, I produced frequency tables (no inferential statistics were required for my research q). Is it then qual or quant CA or mixed methods?

I would say that you have converted qualitative data into quantitative data, through a process of quantitative content analysis. Some people do consider this to be a form of mixed methods (under the heading of quantizing or quantitizing), but I personally would not call this mixed methods because there are no qualitative results in this kind of analysis. Instead, there is just an integration of two sets of quantitative variables that originated from different sources.

Thank you David L Morgan

Also, do you know if there is any paper explaining this process, I found few by Elo but they keep calling it qualitative and don’t mention the data conversion

i have a book by krippendof