Comparer des méthodes

	Analyse critique de documents	Analyse de contenu critique
Domaine	Qualitatif	Qualitatif
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	Late 20th – early 21st century (2000s–present as an explicit variant)	1980s–2000s (consolidated in practice by the 1990s–2000s)
Auteur d'origine	Glenn Bowen; Lindsay Prior (foundational document analysis); critical theory tradition (Freire, Habermas)	Building on Krippendorff (1980) and Altheide (1996); synthesised through critical theory traditions (Frankfurt School, feminist and race critical scholars)
Type	Qualitative research design and analytic method	Qualitative analytical approach
Source fondatrice	Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative Research Journal, 9(2), 27–40.	Altheide, D. L. (1996). Qualitative Media Analysis. Sage. ISBN: 978-0803970892
Alias	CDA-doc, critical documentary analysis, critical policy document analysis, critical textual document analysis	CCA, critical textual analysis, ideological content analysis, critical qualitative content analysis
Apparentées	5	5
Résumé	Critical document analysis is a qualitative method that systematically examines written, visual, or digital documents — such as policy texts, institutional reports, curriculum materials, and official records — through a critical theoretical lens. Rather than treating documents as neutral containers of information, it interrogates how documents produce, reflect, and reproduce power relations, ideologies, and social inequalities. The approach draws on critical theory traditions, including the work of Paulo Freire and Jurgen Habermas, as well as established frameworks for document analysis developed by Bowen and Prior.	Critical content analysis is a qualitative approach that examines texts, media, and documents not merely for manifest meaning but for how they construct, reinforce, or contest relations of power, ideology, race, gender, and class. Grounded in critical theory traditions, it asks whose interests a text serves, what voices are silenced, and how language and representation naturalise dominant worldviews. It combines systematic analytic rigour with an explicitly emancipatory or transformative research stance.