On Methodology And Applications Of Content Analysis

Content analysis is a systematic, objective and quantitative method for studying communication messages. It is designed for quantitative analysis of all valuable documents that can be recorded and preserved, and has made certain achievements when it is applied extensively in every field of social science nowadays, including journalism and communication, library and information science, politics and military science, sociology and psychology, etc. This article proceeds with the overall introduction of the forming and development of content analysis, and analyzes its attributes, characteristics and applications as well. At the same time, combined with the current situation of domestic and international content research, the trends in which is also discussed and some suggestions are put forward. This article is supposed to promote the application of this method in information management, and offer some constructive suggestions to supplement and consummate the method system of information science.As a new research method in social science formed in the Second World War, content analysis has its obvious characteristics and updated clue. It requires the researchers to follow the rules of objectivity, system and quantification. To have objectivity, the analysis must be carried out on the basis of explicitly formulated rules which will enable two or more persons to obtain the same results from the same documents. In a systematic analysis the inclusion and exclusion of content or categories is done according to consistently applied criteria of selection. By4quantitative analysis we mean that statistics is used in study and the findings are presented in the form of number or diagrams. However, content analysis is not a purely quantitative method. It makes inferences of the change in quality by analyzing the change in quantity of the communication messages, that is to say, it is a research method both qualitative and quantitative. In fact, whether the research using content analysis is qualitative or quantitative depends on the emphases of the study or the preferences of the researchers. In resent years, the application of computer to content analysis makes great influences on the development of it, which reduces the distance or combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis. The development of full-text database facilitates the operations, and the techniques of data mining and knowledgediscovery provide more opportunities.Besides theoretic study, some applying examples are presented. In the last part of the article, an overseas case and a domestic case are introduced and compared, which is supposed to make clear the steps in details and compare the differences of the way in which the method is used.This thesis is one of the research contents and fruits of the project of A study on Bibliometrics and Content Analysis. It includes 7 tables and 3 graphs.