Ethnographic Content Analysis

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.