An Overview of Content Analysis

Content analysis is a method for analysing the content of a variety of data, such as visual and verbal data. It enables the reduction of phenomena or events into defined categories so as to better analyse and interpret them. This paper provides an overview of content analysis from a marketing perspective. The basic concepts and techniques are presented for operationalising content analyses. As a methodology, it can be both qualitative, usually in developmental stages of research, and quantitative where it is applied to determine frequency of phenomena. Thus, it lends itself to the use of computers to analyse data and, therefore, some of the main packages currently available to researchers are mentioned. The benefits and limitations of adopting content analysis are discussed along with an introduction to sequential analysis, a complementary approach which may be used to enhance understanding and strengthen research design.