Quantitative Content Analysis

Quantitative content analysis is a systematic, replicable method for converting the manifest content of text, images, or other recorded communication into numerical data. By applying a pre-specified codebook to a defined corpus and counting or scaling the resulting categories, researchers obtain frequency distributions, proportions, and relationships that can be subjected to standard statistical tests. It is the dominant method for large-scale, objective analysis of media, documents, social media posts, policy texts, and similar materials.