Blackwell Reference Online

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Quantitative content analysis is an empirical method used in the social sciences primarily for analyzing recorded human communication in a quantitative, systematic, and intersubjective way. This material can include newspaper articles, films, advertisements, interview transcripts, or observational protocols, for instance. Thus, a quantitative content analysis can be applied to verbal material, and also to visual material like the evening news or television entertainment. Surveys, →  observations , and quantitative content analysis are the main three methods of data collection in empirical communication research, with quantitative content analysis the most prominent in the field (→  Survey ). In other disciplines like psychology or sociology quantitative content analysis is not used as widely. Ole R. Holsti (1969) defines quantitative content analysis as “any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages.” Bernhard Berelson (1952) speaks of “a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication.” There has been much debate on this classical definition of quantitative content analysis: what does the word “manifest” mean, and is it possible to analyze latent structures of human communication beyond the surface of the manifest text, i.e., the “black ... log in or subscribe to read full text