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| Ethnographic Content Analysis× | Qualitative Content Analysis× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field≠ | Anthropology | Qualitative Research |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1987 | 1980 |
| Originator≠ | David L. Altheide | Klaus Krippendorff; refined by Margrit Schreier |
| Type≠ | Reflexive, iterative qualitative analysis of documents and media | Method |
| Seminal source≠ | Altheide, D. L. (1987). Ethnographic content analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 10(1), 65–77. DOI ↗ | Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage Publications. link ↗ |
| Aliases≠ | ECA, Reflexive Content Analysis, Qualitative Media Analysis, Altheide's Content Analysis | Content Analysis, Categorical Content Analysis |
| Related≠ | 4 | 2 |
| Summary≠ | Ethnographic content analysis (ECA), developed by David Altheide, is a reflexive and iterative approach to the qualitative analysis of documents and media that blends the systematic coding of classic content analysis with an ethnographic sensibility toward meaning and context. Rather than fixing categories in advance and counting their occurrence, the analyst moves back and forth between concepts and data, letting categories emerge, change, and deepen as the corpus is read. The goal is to understand how meaning is constructed and patterned in texts — newspapers, reports, broadcasts, online media — much as a fieldworker comes to understand a setting. | Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is a systematic, inductive method for analyzing textual or visual data by identifying and categorizing meaning units into content categories. Developed and formalized by Klaus Krippendorff (1980), QCA can be purely qualitative (inductive, exploratory) or combined with quantitative counting; it analyzes manifest content (explicit, surface meanings) and latent content (underlying, interpretive meanings). |
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