Content analysis

define a list of categories, in relation to your research question.

select which documents to collect. These can be interviews, notes from an ethnography, press articles, social media content…​ it matters that the type of source and the rules that define which source to be collected, are defined in coherence with the research question.

collect documents (conducting interviews, retrieving articles from a database…​)

organize and format documents, as needed. For instance, it will be convenient to transcribe your interviews before you analyze them. Visit the page on free tools to transcribe interviews and any audio file.

you found great documents formatted in pdf? Analyzing the text contained in them might be tricky. To help you with this, I have developped 2 free web tools:

a click & point function to search hundreds of pdfs and return the search terms with their context

a click & point function to extract text from specific regions in hundreds of pdfs.

read the documents and apply your categorization scheme to it: each time you find that a document corresponds to one of your categories, you must write down the exact sentence or paragraph where this happens.

iterate (modify, improve) on the coding scheme while conducting the analysis, or after it, as necessary.

synthetize results (eg, in a table) and do some simple checks and counts: did all categories of the categorization scheme apply to the content you collected? Do the documents relate to all the categories in the same manner, or are there variations?