Week 5: Content Analysis & Historical Research

Content analysis is a research tool used to determine the presence of certain words or concepts within texts or sets of texts. Researchers quantify and analyze the presence, meanings, and relationships of such words and concepts, then make inferences about the messages within the texts, the writer(s), the audience, and even the culture and time of which these are a part. Texts can be defined broadly as books, book chapters, essays, interviews, discussions, newspaper headlines and articles, historical documents, speeches, conversations, advertising, theater, informal conversation, or really any occurrence of communicative language. Texts in a single study may also represent a variety of different types of occurrences, such as Palmquist's 1990 study of two composition classes, in which he analyzed student and teacher interviews, writing journals, classroom discussions and lectures, and out-of-class interaction sheets. To conduct a content analysis on any such text, the text is coded, or broken down, into manageable categories on a variety of levels--word, word sense, phrase, sentence, or theme--and then examined using one of content analysis' basic methods: conceptual analysis or relational analysis.

Historical research 

is a qualitative technique. Historical research studies the meaning of past events in an attempt to interpret the facts and explain the cause of events, and their effect on the present events. In doing so, researchers rely heavily on primary historical data (direct accounts of events, archival data - official documents, personal records, and records of eyewitnesses) and less frequently on secondary historical data (information from persons who didn’t witness the event; e.g. textbooks, newspapers, encyclopedias). Historical research data is subject to external criticism (verification of genuineness or validity of the source) and internal criticism (exploring the meaning of the source). Historical research has time and place dimensions. Simple chronology is not considered historical research because it does not interpret the meaning of events.