Facilitator: Professor Louise Vincent (M.Phil. D.Phil. Oxon) is a qualitative research methodologist with a particular passion for narrative research. She works as a research capacity development consultant for a number of universities – assisting academic staff and masters and doctoral students with a range of research endeavours, including proposal writing, writing for publication, qualitative data generation methods, qualitative data analysis methods, qualitative analysis software, transcription, literature reviewing and the use of theory in qualitative data interpretation.
Target Group: Masters and Doctoral Candidates
Background: Content analysis has to do with the analysis of text in a wide variety of forms including interview transcripts, observations, reports, newspapers articles, speeches, mission statements, parliamentary debates, and policy documents. Content analysis involves the deployment of specialised procedures for processing which allow for the emergence of, new insight into, and understanding of, a particular phenomenon. Content analysts identify specific characteristics of texts and extract specific information from texts. The aim is to make replicable and valid inferences from texts in order to understand not only the text itself but the context in which it is produced. Through the procedures of content analysis the properties of texts that may otherwise go unnoticed are revealed.
The workshop introduces participants to the difference between inductive and deductive content analysis, the differences, and uses of, quantitative and qualitative forms of content analysis, the kinds of research questions that are answered using content analytic approaches to texts, the role of theory in different forms of content analysis and how, practically to do content analysis using several different approaches.
This workshop is funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) through the University Capacity Development Grant (UCDG)