On making use of conceptual content analysis to make sense of Internet information

07 January, 2013

Internet has become a major source of accessing information as well as research use in social sciences. This has brought the technique of content analysis to centre stage for research in many subject areas. But, unfortunately, mere cut and paste method is being used to produce so called research studies using the information available on the Internet.

IN CONCEPTUAL content analysis, a concept is chosen for examination and its analysis involves quantifying by tallying its presence with a focus at the occurrence of selected terms within a text or texts that may be implicit as well as explicit.

As a method of research, the conceptual content analysis involves the following steps: (i) identifying research questions with a focus on a concept or term; (ii) choosing a sample or samples as the textual material and making the coding choices; (iii) codifying the text into manageable conceptual content categories like positive or negative words as selective reduction of data; (iv) looking for and interpreting the words or patterns that are indicative of the research question.

An example of a conceptual analysis could be to examine the number of positive words used to describe a thing, proposal, policy or plan. The conceptual content analysis research aims at quantifying or coding the identified word-choices to examine their presence with respect to the research question, i.e., is there a stronger presence of positive or negative words used with respect to the coding choice in the document.

Thus conceptual content analysis is a research method focused on the actual content and internal features of a content-loaded medium is used to determine the presence of certain words, concepts, themes, phrases, qualities, values, characters, or sentences within texts or sets of texts and to quantify this presence in an objective manner. The results are then used to make inferences about the messages within the text.

The content medium can be the information on the Internet as well as in the books, book chapters, essays, interviews, discussions, keywords, index, headlines, articles, historical documents, speeches, conversations, advertisements, films, theater and informal conversation. The content for analysis could be any occurrence of communicative language from any resource or media.