We are planning to use summative content analysis in our proposed qualitative study in identifying/exploring the vision of Filipino people about their health. We propose to use qualitative survey to collect these data. I understand that summative content analysis start by counting the frequency of the codes/contents, also called as the manifest content analysis. But what I am not sure about is - how exactly the latent content analysis is being done or "examining the context within which direct versus euphemistic terms were used" (Hsieh and Shannon 2005) or "discovering the underlying meaning of the words or the contents" (Morse & Field, 1995).
What are your thoughts about this or any worked example/s about conducting summative content analysis?
Thank you very much.
Dear Celso,
Congratulations on your project. Please, these attached resources would help you in conducting your summative content analysis. Best regards
Content analysis is a widely used qualitative research technique. Rather than being a single method, current applications of content analysis show three distinct approaches: conventional, directed, or summative.
All three approaches are used to interpret meaning from the content of text data and, hence, adhere to the naturalistic paradigm.
See the attached paper at links below:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Three-approaches-to-qualitative-content-analysis-Hsieh-Shannon/7680fde668eb1e7a085378d7b2aa7556be583f97
https://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download/mq:42169/DS01?view=true
As far as I know, summative content analysis, as described by Hsieh and Shannon (2005) has seen relatively little use. Can you say more about why you choose this particular method, as opposed to the more common approaches of either inductive or deductive development of coding systems?
For finding examples of summative content analysis, I suggest you use a two-step process with Google Scholar: first, locate the original Hsieh and Shannon article and click on its 14,000 plus citations; second, use the option to search within those citations for the word "summative." When I did this, I came up with more than 1,000 references.
As professor Kundu states, content analysis is not one single method and there are several ways of performing analysis with focus content of data. If you would like to combine some kind of counting with an interpretive analysis of qualitative data, you could consider combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis, and do so with reference to Krippendorff:
Krippendorff, K. (2013). Content analysis : an introduction to its methodology (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE.
I have combined quantitative and qualitative content analysis myslef in one of my articles. I did not count words, as you describe can be done in summative content analysis. I my article I counted data from collected forms and combined analysis of these data with an interpretive qualitative approach. This made good use of both kinds of data from my project and the both approaches deepened the results from the study.
Here is the reference to the study:
Rejnö, Å., Danielson, E., & Berg, L. (2013). Strategies for handling ethical problems in sudden and unexpected death. Nursing Ethics, 20(6), 708-722. doi:10.1177/0969733012473770
And here one to a methods case written on the same study:
Rejnö, Å., Danielson, E., & Berg, L. (2017). Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Content Analysis: A Way to Utilize Different Types of Data in Research of Ethical Problems in Acute Stroke Care. SAGE research methods cases (pp. 17). London: SAGE.
Thank you very for these very useful resource materials. Thanks for your comments and suggestions!
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