formation and transmission of group standards, values, attitudes, and skills
are accomplished largely by means of verbal communication. Education in
the schools, in the home, in business, in the neighborhood and through the
mass media is brought about by the transmission of information and by
the exercise of controls which are largely mediated through written or
spoken words. If one is concerned with problems of social organization,
the situation is similar. Supervision, management, coordination, and the
exertion of influence are principally matters of verbal interaction. Social
and political conflicts, although often stemming from divergent economic
interests and power, cannot be fully understood without studying the
words employed in the interaction of conflicting groups, and the process
of mediation consists largely in talking things out. The work of the world,
and its entertainment, too, is in no small measure mediated by verbal and
other symbolic behavior.

Similar comments might equally well be made by a representative of any
of the social sciences or humanities. As a consequence, the study of
Communication content has been approached from a variety of different
starting points and undertaken with the tools and conceptual frameworks
of several disciplines. Content analysis is a multipurpose research method
developed specifically for investigating any problem in which the content
of communication serves as the basis of inference. In this chapter we shall
develop this point further from several perspectives: What are the defining
characteristics of content analysis? For what types of research problems is
it most likely to prove useful? What are the major trends in the nature of
the method, and what are the purposes for which it has been used?

Nearly all research in the social sciences and humanities depends in one
way or another on careful reading of written materials. Given the ubiquity
of this process in research, what characteristics distinguish content analysis
from any careful reading of documents? Definitions of content analysis
have tended to change over time with developments in technique and with
application of the tool itself to new problems and types of materials.
Among the definitions which have been proposed are the following:

Content analysis is the statistical semantics of political discourse ( Kaplan,
1943, p. 230).

"Content analysis" may be defined as referring to any technique a) for the
classification of the sign-vehicles, b) which relies solely upon the
judgments (which theoretically, may range from perceptual discrimina-
tions to sheer guesses) of an analyst or group of analysts as to which
sign-vehicles fall into which categories, c) on the basis of explicitly

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