I am doing content analysis desk-based research. How do I determine by the sample population of the study? Is it really relevant since I am not dealing with humans?
Unless you can examine all the content in a given area, you will almost always need to take some kind of sample of the total content available. In that regard, readers and reviewers are certain to want to know how you selected the content that you chose to analyze.
It may or may not be relevant depending on where you are hoping to generalize your results. For instance, suppose I am scraping Twitter messages on a particular topic such as COVID -19. The sample could be a sub-set of any number of populations (not just humans). In this instance, the population could be the messages, different users, days of appearance, or even such things as themes or hashtags. If I am trying to even weakly generalize to those populations then the population would be useful to provide the context of your findings. If on the other hand, you are not trying to generalize and perhaps just doing an exploratory study to expose kinds of topics then the population would be less relevant. If you are trying to demonstrate the existence of concepts from either a qualitative or critical perspective then the population may or may not be as relevant as a quantitative study.
@Nicholas, I am studying publications on the topic.Thanks for your insight.
Regards
Emmanuel
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