Analytical Approaches

These are the different types of analytical approaches to analysing that you could use:

Content Analysis

Content analysis is a systematic method used to turn items into content categories. This method follows explicit rules of coding, and enables large quantities of data to be categorized with relative ease. Content analysis offers a quick, broad overview of data sets, and as such can be used to support other more detailed methods of textual analysis.

Evaluative Assertion Analysis

This approach, based on work in the 1950s by the psycholinguist Charles Osgood, attempts to map texts and their object referents by reducing them to fairly unequivocal evaluative statements. EAA was later developed using Computer-Assisted Evaluative Text Analysis.

Frame Analysis

Frame analysis looks for key themes within a text, and shows how cultural themes shape our understanding of events. In studies of the media, frame analysis shows how aspects of the language and structure of news items emphasize certain aspects.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis examines how the social world is constituted through discourse. Within DA there are various distinct traditions including conversation analysis and ethnomethodology; sociolinguistics; discursive psychology; critical discourse analysis; Bakhtinian research; and Foucauldian research.

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