This clearly depends on the focus you are choosing for analysing text. 'Text analysis' is a rather general term that might include every aspect of textual analysis, thus from a linguistic or literary science or cultural science perspective as well as from a cognitive or computational perspective. The term is too general to be defined in more detail.

Content analysis rather concerns the analysis of the semantic content, thus what is expressed by the text, its units and its structure. What is the actual content of the text and not the message behind, for example.

Text processing is more the description of how texts are understood and operated during reception. This can be analysed from a cognitive perspective or a more computational perspective - again depending on the focus.

So, for clear definitions of these methods you need more context and a more specified perspective.

Thanks a lot for your answer. I am definitely not an expert in this area and your words help a lot.

So if I got it right:

- Text analysis as a term is that general that basically everything would fit into whatever you are going to do with text (sounds quite like text analysis :) )

- Content analysis is a semantic analysis, structure, units etc.

- which means content analysis is not what is subsumed under qualitative data analysis methods like hermeneutics, grounded theory and the like

- content analysis is also different to what Mayring calls Content Analysis (Inhaltsanalyse)

- text processing: I think I didn't understood it, could you give maybe some examples for that

- text processing and content analysis are both sorts of text analysis

Thanks for clearing this out again.

I am asking all this since I want to categorize more precisely software tools for qualitative data analysis and my categorization is still kind of a mess:

http://www.sosciso.de/en/software/datenanalyse/qualitativ/

Ok, but it seems that I wasn't clear enough in all details. You got 'text analysis', I think ;-)

But 'content analysis' may also include what Mayring names 'Inhaltsanalyse', it's exactly the translation everyone would choose here. But Mayring comes from a psychological perspective, right? So he is interested in what the text is about - clearly a content analysis. But the question is: How to get to the content? Mayring tries to find definitions and categories that are given by the text. This analysis can, for example, be based on a linguistic examination of the semantic content as expressed by words, the syntactical structure, its context etc. Example: Asking in detail what is meant by the German word 'Bank', for example, in a specific context. Without any context, we cannot know whether it is the institution where we place money or the thing to sit on.

From a linguistic perspective, thus focussing on the material the text gives us to construct meaning out of it, content analysis asks how this meaning is constructed by choosing a specific term or a specific structure of the sentence.

But, content analysis may also include hermeneutics and the other perspectives you mentioned, taking these perspectives as the specific context in which you analyse meanings.

So, to be honest: 'content analysis' is a term as general as 'text analysis', but focusses more on the semantics/meanings of the text and not the form in which or the way this meaning is expressed. (Traditional differentiation between form/content, for example, by Louis Hjelmslev and others.)

And 'text processing' as a term is also difficult. To give examples for other terms that might describe the same thing: computer processing, mental processing, text comprehension - again: dependent on the focus or perspective. From a linguistic perspective, text processing might describe the examination of how units of a text (for example words or sentences or non-verbal units such as gesture, images in a film, etc.) are operated to come to the meaning of the text, thus to describe the content. How do we perceive and receive the meaning of the word 'Bank', for example? There are a lot of models in cognitive linguistics that try to describe semantic networks and the cognitive basis of operating words in a text, for example. Simply spoken: Which semantic network do you refer to when talking about 'Bank' as the thing to sit on, which network for the other meaning of 'Bank', etc...

Another big branch in linguistics is that of natural language processing, for example, which is interested in interactions between computers and human languages, so to make a computer understand what you're saying - not only the sounds you are producing when talking, but also the meaning you're expressing.

I don't really get what you're are aiming at when describing the software with 'text analysis' and 'content analysis' For me, it seems that every software is doing a kind of 'text analysis/examination'. So from a social science perspective, it doesn't seem very useful for me to differentiate these tools by giving them these categories. Isn't it rather important to describe their aims and results in more detail?

< Isn't it rather important to describe their aims and results in more detail?

Definitely. But as it is for any kind of category system there are advantages in grouping things under categories. Therefore, I am scanning for possible categories how to classify different kind of qualitative analysis tools. Of course, functional aspects (the connection between aims and results) could be a starting point. So (1), probably, I should start with the methods served by the different software programs. I could also (2) take what the developers of the software tell about their programs. Or, (3) the users, social scientists which used the software for different purposes.

Even though I know the risks about generalizing, I want to give advice to students and researchers on what kind of software to chose for assisting in what kind of concrete purpose/research method/function. And as deep (not that much) as I dived into the sujet, it is rather complicated....

A categorization of the available software tools using the terms "text analysis", "content analysis" and "text processing" seems rather difficult to me, as some of the programs allow multiple ways to analyse text. Furthermore there are qualitative data analysis tools, e.g. videograph, that do not use text material but video material from scientific observations, which is categorized during the analysis. Therefore, I would favor your approach (1), stating the different methods served by the tools, which you could extend by (a) the material (text, audio, video) the programs permit for analysis, and (b) the result of the analysis (category system, summarization of the material, etc.).

Another aspect that - to my opinion - should not be forgotten is text mining, which partly falls into the domain of content analysis, although one can argue whether these methods are qualitative or quantitative in nature. In particular I refer to methods, which try to assess automatically the meaning of content (e.g. whether the german word "Mutter" refers to mother or to the nut of a bolt) within n-grams, that is within a certain length of context within the text.