Compare methods

	Ethnographic Content Analysis	Visual Anthropology
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2001
Originator	David L. Altheide	Visual anthropology tradition (synthesized by Marcus Banks; ethnographic film lineage)
Type	Reflexive, iterative qualitative analysis of documents and media	Use and analysis of images as ethnographic data and representation
Seminal source	Altheide, D. L. (1987). Ethnographic content analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 10(1), 65–77.	Banks, M. (2001). Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage. ISBN: 9780761963646
Aliases	ECA, Reflexive Content Analysis, Qualitative Media Analysis, Altheide's Content Analysis	Visual Ethnography, Ethnographic Film and Photography, Image-Based Anthropology, Anthropology of Visual Media
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.	Visual anthropology is the use and analysis of photography, film, video, and other visual artefacts both as ethnographic evidence about a culture and as a means of representing anthropological knowledge. It encompasses images the researcher makes in the field, images that members of a community produce themselves, and images already circulating within a society, and it studies all of them as social objects with meanings and effects. As Marcus Banks frames it, every image carries an internal narrative — what it depicts — and an external narrative — the social relations of its making, circulation, and use — and visual anthropology attends to both.