content analysis

Content analysis is a technique where researchers use computer software to perform various statistical operations on a large body of text. It is often used in the social sciences to explore and summarize texts such as newspaper articles (media studies), answers to open-ended questions (psychology and sociology), and speeches (political science).

The most common statistic collected in content analysis is the word count, which is just a simple tally of the number of times a certain word is used in a group of texts. Also common is the text concordance (Key Word In Context) which displays a word along with the phrase or sentence that the word appears with for each occurrence of that word. Concordances are most often seen in the results of Internet search engines such as Google.

In this project, I use several different formulas to link common content analysis statistics with the rating (on a 100-point scale) that each record is given by its reviewer.

close