Content analysis

CONTENT ANALYSIS
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Introduction
Content analysis was developed by Alfred R. Lindesmith in 1931. It became popular in 1960s and since then various types of content analysis such as relational analysis and conceptual analysis have been discovered. Nowadays, researchers are carrying out computer-aided content analysis. This paper seeks to define content analysis and discuss when it is applied, give the merits and demerits of content analysis as well as computer-aided content analysis.
What is content analysis?
Content analysis is a technique of summarize many words of text using coding rules. It involves making inferences by establishing certain characteristics of a message.
When is it appropriate?When determining authorship
Content analysis is used when determining authorship. This involves gathering a list of suspected authors, studying their prior writings, as well as, correlating the frequency of words or nouns that help to establish the probability of each person’s authorship of specific data.
When making inferences about communication
Content analysis used when making inferences on characteristics and antecedents of communication. This is important in analyzing traits of individuals and comparing communication content to standard as well as analyzing the flow of information.
What its benefits and shortcomings 
Benefits of content analysis
It is unobtrusive
One of advantages of content analysis is that it gets untainted information. Researchers get clean data from event documents rather than interviewing participants who may give biased information. The documents contain complete and relevant information.
Ability to deal with Documentation
Content analysis deals with huge volumes of data that are analyzed by researchers. This means that researchers are able to access large files and insert relevant information consistently which facilitates scientific research.Shortcomings
It is time consuming
Content analysis is extremely time consuming. It is difficult to automate this exercise, which would make it less tedious hence save time.
It is highly subjective to human error.
Content analysis can be unreliable especially when relational analysis is applie...