Issues and Best Practices in Content Analysis

2015/09/28 by Stephen Lacy, Brendan R. Watson, Daniel Riffe +1 · 1 voice · 12 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Educational Research and Analysis

paper · doi:10.1177/1077699015607338

openalex publication_date 2015/09/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

This article discusses three issues concerning content analysis method and ends with a list of best practices in conducting and reporting content analysis projects. Issues addressed include the use of search and databases for sampling, the differences between content analysis and algorithmic text analysis, and which reliability coefficients should be calculated and reported. The “Best Practices” section provides steps to produce reliable and valid content analysis data and the appropriate reporting of those steps so the project can be properly evaluated and replicated.

Citations

• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television
• Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods
• Computing inter‐rater reliability and its variance in the presence of high agreement
• Content Analysis and the Algorithmic Coder

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Discussions

• My suggestion is perhaps surprisingly mundane: Adding a piece on producing what Birkenmaier et al. call "gold-standard data", i.e. high-quality hand-coding, i.e., classical content analysis. Lacy et a [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Content Analysis and the Algorithmic Coder
• Three Approaches to Qualitative Content Analysis
• Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods
• The Handbook of Qualitative and Quantitative Content Analysis
• Content analysis and thematic analysis