"Content analysis" has evolved into an umbrella label that includes various procedures for making reliable, valid inferences from qualitative data, including text, speech, and images. These procedures have improved and expanded due to numerous developments in recent years since this encyclopedia's first edition.

Traditionally, "content analysis" has referred to systematic procedures for assigning prespecified codes to text, such as interviews, newspaper editorials, open-ended survey answers, or focus-group transcripts, and then analyzing patterns in the codings. Some projects will count each specific occurrence within a text, while others will have coders tally the number of column inches assigned a code. Either way, the procedure usually employs a "top down" strategy, beginning with a theory and hypotheses to be tested, developing reliable coding categories, applying these to coding-specified bodies of text, and finally testing the hypotheses by statistically comparing code indexes across documents.

With the increasing popularity of...