British Journal of Sociology

Book review: the revival of content analysis

Klaus Krippendorff (2004) Content analysis. An introduction to its methodology,

London, Sage (2nd revised edition)

Roberto Franzosi (2004) From words to numbers. Narrative, data and social science,
Cambridge, CUP [Structural analysis in the social sciences, vol 22].

Arguably, garments have a fashion cycle, so do social science research methods.

When I entered university in the late 1970s content analysis (CA) scored high in the
hierarchy of methods. Soon it fell from grace and became the bogeyman of any
lecturer intent on demonstrating how unintelligent empirical research could be. But
CA survived conveniently suited to the nine month post-graduate teaching cycle: its
takes one session and the student is magically empowered to conduct or appreciate
empirical research. This leaves CA with a somewhat dubious reputation. It also does
not help that CA never managed to spin-off a large commercial industry like focus
groups, questionnaires and opinion polls did, which puts many young and ambitious
content analysts into a disadvantage on the labour market.

While in the past serious CA had its bottleneck in data collection. The text gathering
absorbed most of the project funding and effort, and by the time coding fatigue set in,
the results often turned out nave and superficial. The IT revolution of the 1980s and
1990s changed this situation. Some newspaper archives are now accessible on-line
back into the 18th century (!!), and the WWW and internet are an extraordinary data
dungeon. Henceforth, the bottleneck is analysis. These two books clearly mark the
culmination of a recent revival of CA sparked by the ready availability of data
materials of all kinds. Jointly they hail the human coder as indispensable, but
demonstrate two different uses of CA: semantic and structural analysis.

Both books leave behind the false expectations raised in the 1960s (e.g. by the
General Enquirer program) that the arrival of the computer might finally deliver the
objective reading of texts and do away with the problems of interpretation and the
unreliability of human coders. To the contrary, computerised text-processing
highlights the interpretive efficacy of human coders and the ease with which a
computer can get things completely wrong. Automatic text analysis mutated into the
more modest computer-assisted content analysis supported by a growing range of
analytic routines. The fall-out of 9/11 might move things again, like WWII and the
Cold War spurred the development of CA: security surveillance throws up streams of
textual data and these need analyses. If I dare a prediction: we will see text mining
as an area of developments of semi-automatic if not automatic text analysis to arrive
on a large scale. Hopefully, we will soon see a common software platform for text
analytic routines which provides the researcher with what SPSS or similar did for
statistical routines.

Beyond their communality in hailing the human coder, these two books clearly differ
by exemplifying two outlooks, the semantic and the structural use of content analysis.
In semantic analysis the researcher seeks to characterise the discourse of X at time t
and make inferences to its context. Semantic analysis has its origin in propaganda
analysis and in the psychology of expression where the source is mysterious.
Krippendorffs fully revised and extended 2nd edition of his classic introductory text
of 1980 does encyclopaedic justice to the progress of this type of analysis. It has three
parts, conceptualisation, components of CA, and analytical paths with an extended
discussion of the reliability and validity problems. The latter includes a detailed
exposition of the agreement index Alpha and its extension to unitizing, and an
overview of the range of computer-assistance that is available. The inferential and
constructivist logic of complexity reduction remains the key feature of Krippendorffs
presentation: content analysts infer answers to particular research questions from
their texts. Their inferences are merely more systematic, explicitly informed, and
(ideally) verifiable than what ordinary readers do with texts (p25). Thus CA is a
method among others that moves the researcher from a large amount of text to a
context of understanding; and this constructive effort of the researcher requires
ratification by scientific peers. The analysis focuses on textual representations and
how these express, appeal to and refer to a social context.

The second use of content analysis is presented by Franzosis fascinating book. In

structural analysis the researcher is not interested in discourse and representation per
se, but seeks to observe social action through texts. The origin of this type of analysis
is in social movement research and its discontents with social statistics. The fact that
official strike statistics only records the number of strike actions and the working
hours lost makes a highly uninformative database to study the logic and dynamics of
social movement actions, such as workers strikes and other public protests. Franzosi
systematises the analysis of conflict events with the creation of a database of logical
triplets subject-action-objects plus modalities (who does what?) which are the
structural building blocks common to the narratives and the events to which they
refer. Collections of accounts referring to social events are translated into a corpus of
tagged texts based on the idea of the story grammar, and the coded narrative data
preserves the structural features of the events in a relational database. CA is thus
grounded in formal linguistic theory and set theory. As SPSS is not suitable for this
type of database, Franzosi develops a computer programme and software package to
code and analyse relational data. It reminds us that basic statistics cannot and should
not be the only formalism to prepare ambitious students for empirical research.

My fascination with this book arises from both content and style. Franzosi presents
his approach as a historical quest. It is a book of scholarship and methodological
passion. Franzosi is a great fabulator that carries the reader along with engaging
histories of the medieval search for an art of memory, the quest of the Alchemists to
make gold out of lesser metals, and the first hand accounts of the discoveries of the
Americas. Arguably, this is the only methodology book to be read on a holiday
without the risk of boredom. These histories become motivating tales in the quest for
a system to capture everything important, to find something other than searched for
and being surprised (Columbus believed to have reached India on a different route,
others had to be surprised), and for the transmutation of words into numbers and
graphs. The book culminates in a set of methodological maxims to instruct the novice
which show that pre-modern, modern or post-modern quests might have more in
common than commonly recognised. Albertus Magnus and Thomas of Aquinas get
for once a rather good press.
Franzosi dismisses semantic content analysis; he studies protest actions and not the
discourse of the mass media. But I do not see why the logic of story grammar - text
materials as data, narrative and set theory as foundations once flexibly implemented
into a computer package, could not be useful also to characterise discourse in time
and space. Like Columbus, Franzosis quest might yield something else than
intended. His premature dismissal might be a corollary of what an Italian colleague
called a book written in anger. One gets a sense of the heroic rhetorical effort of the
book to counter a social scientific dualism with a set of ideas that are doubly out of
sink with the common mind frame: steering clear of the trodden paths of statistical
causality on the one hand and the post-modern dismissal of any formalism as
positivist on the other. Here is another third way attempting to avoid the fallacy of
the excluded middle: neither-nor is the moral of the story.

In summary, it seems to me that for some years to come these two books will have
said all that needs to be written in textbooks about content analysis with human
coders, and Franzosis is also a fascinating read that carries you into a new world.
These books show that CA is without doubt a serious social scientific method that
should be part of any research curriculum, and these two books define its canon.
Maybe Max Webers advise to the cultural sociologist will finally be heeded, albeit
metaphorically: take out the scissors and start cutting newspapers. We now know
much more about how we might go about doing that.

Martin W Bauer
Reader in Social Psychology and Research Methodology
Institute of Social Psychology & Methodology Institute, LSE

M.bauer@lse.ac.uk

November 2006