Compare methods

	Ethnographic Content Analysis	Ethnographic Research
Field	Anthropology	Qualitative Research
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	1920s–1970s
Originator	David L. Altheide	Anthropology (Malinowski, Boas); applied in health and sociology (Geertz)
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.	Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic Books.
Aliases	ECA, Reflexive Content Analysis, Qualitative Media Analysis, Altheide's Content Analysis	Ethnography, Participatory Observation, Field Research
Related	4	4
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.	Ethnographic research is an immersive qualitative methodology in which researchers spend prolonged time in a community, organization, or social setting, combining participant observation, interviews, and document analysis to develop a rich, contextual understanding of a group's beliefs, practices, and social structures. Grounded in anthropology and refined for health, organizational, and social research, ethnography produces 'thick description' (Geertz 1973) that reveals the meaning and context underlying observable behavior.