Content Analysis as Qualitative Tool for Interview Analysis

Content analysis as method of inquiry is applied to extract meaning from text in a systematic, logical and consistent manner. For Weber (1990:9), content analysis is “a research method that uses a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text”.

Content analysis makes possible the identification of key themes, patterns, or ideas in a text and also can contribute to identifying what is unique or controversial to the text at hand. With regard to interview analysis, it allows for the theoretically guided, systematic analysis of recorded communication (Mayring 2000:106; Elo and Kyngäs 2008:109; cf. Mayring 1994:200-207).

While the systematic analysis of text can be traced back to the methods of the Church Inquisition of the 17^th century (Krippendorff 2004:3) and was, with the rise of modern universities, increasingly applied for the analysis of (mass) media, the term ‘content analysis’ as scientific method entered the social sciences first in US American

communication studies and political science from the 1930s onwards (Krippendorff 2004:6-8). Its was methodologically refined for scientific inquiry by Lasswell and his colleagues at the University of Chicago, among others, in the 1940s (Stone 1966:24-30)¹⁵.

The larger debate in the social sciences between positivist and hermeneutic epistemologies can also be traced the debates regarding content analysis, which has been received more as a quantitative than as a qualitative tool for a long time, as the main concern of many researchers applying content analysis has been the quantification of text through frequency counts of certain words and expressions.

Increasingly, qualitative content analysis has come to the fore, and there exist various versions of explicitly qualitative content analysis¹⁶, which, according to Krippendorff (2004:17) share certain basic characteristics, even though they vary in their theoretical roots and analytical perspectives. These characteristics include the sample size – most require a close reading of a small amount of text –, the emphasis on interpretation and re-articulation of text and the explicit acknowledgement of the influence of the researcher's own socially and culturally conditioned understandings on the interpretation of textual matter. While still being a decisively empirically grounded method geared towards inferring meaning from text, the idea of text being a mere container for content that can be interpretively inferred without any loss or misinterpretation in meaning has been largely abandoned, leading to a more self-reflexive and critical relation between the researcher and the text he or she is aiming to infer meaning from (Krippendorff 2004:xvii-xx).

By taking this road into interpretive political science, I explicitly acknowledge the responsibility of the researcher for the conclusions drawn from the data. Qualitative content analysis of this kind is heavily based on interpretation and demands reflexivity of his or her own subject position from the researcher, both in terms of one’s position of power and in terms of one’s position with regard to the topic studied and the intentions invested into the research and its results. The importance of recognizing the subjectivity inherent in such an analysis has to be emphasized even more when applying content analysis to infer meaning from text based on interview data: interviews are an

15 For a detailed history of the development of content analysis as scientific method of the social sciences, please confer to Krippendorff (2004:3-17).

16 Even though even the most quantitative version of content analysis, dealing with computer-aided statistical analysis of large samples, is actually based on a qualitative reading of text that is converted to numerical measurements, more positivist approaches to content analysis do not necessarily acknowledge this basic fact. Content analysis in all its variety is at its basis a qualitative method that relies on quantification – coding and counting – to draw conclusions (cf. Kracauer 1952).

intersubjective activity that involves interaction between persons that possess different positions and expectations, making the result of the interview process – the transcribed interview in my case – as much a product of the social dynamic that was at play during the interview as an accurate reflection of the questions asked and the answers given (Fontana and Frey 2000:647). Interviews in this sense are negotiated text that is created through the joint creation of meaning and the grounding of responses through a shared context, and thus as a socially situated activity (Fontana and Frey 2000:663-664). Such a perspective takes into account the context of the interview situation and also acknowledges that the knowledge gained in the interview depends to a large extent also on rapport established between the interviewer and the respondent. What comes into play in interview situations are power positions, status concerns, and the personal character of the people involved, or, as Fontana and Frey (2000:666) argue with regard to the underlying concerns of using interviews as method:

“We need to proceed by looking at the substantive concerns of the members of society while simultaneously examining the constructive activities used to produce order in everyday life, and, all along, remaining reflexive about how interviews are accomplished”.

This concern holds especially true when studying, as a Western female researcher, people and processes in the Global South, as the power differentials, existent in qualitative interviewing in any case, become heightened through the long trajectory of researchers using the Global South to extract knowledge for academic production in the centers (Smith 2005:88-96). Reflecting on how my research perpetuates this trajectory at least to some extent, together with the ethical stance to contextualize and situate my findings and pay attention to the complex identities and experiences of those that have been silenced and making their voice heard, can only aim to balance out the inherent inequalities of such research. These issues will be taken up in the subsequent part of this chapter when reflecting on the ethics of my research.

There are various traditions of qualitative inquiry making use of interviewing, from ethnographic approaches to survey research, all of them linked to distinct epistemological standpoints. As my research interest is largely related to understanding the attitudes of my respondents regarding certain topics, I chose to conduct in-depth semi-structured interviews. While the exact number of participants necessary for qualitative research depends very much on convention and on the research questions asked, Morse (1994 in Ryan and Bernard 2000:780) recommends interviewing at least six respondents when trying to understand a particular shared experience or trying to find themes and patterns. By choosing semi-structured interviews, I also aimed to reveal

patterns, as this form of interview is typically chosen to find out the respondents’ own experiences and view on the themes brought up during the interview, while at the same time ensuring a certain level of comparability between the different interviews through the inclusion of the same themes and questions with broadly the same content.

Using qualitative content analysis as a method to infer meaning from interview material implies the “empirical, methodological controlled analysis of texts within their context of communication” (Mayring 2000:106), which is why my analysis is motivated by the

“assumption that language use can only be understood in context. That is, one needs to evaluate the data in relation to the contexts in which it was both created and later used” (Yates 1998:234-235).

One of my crucial concerns is to take into consideration the context in which my respondents live, as people use “culturally available resources in order to structure their stories”(Silvermann 2000:823). In order to be better able to assess the social environment of my respondents, I also handed out a questionnaire to my respondents that collected their personal background information, from their place and year of birth to their education level and the number of times they lived abroad for a period longer than three months. The data from these questionnaires, while not explicitly referred to in my analysis, helped to gain a richer picture of the life and social environment in which my respondents live, which contributed to the contextualization of my findings

Like any scientific tool, the method of content analysis has to be reliable, meaning most importantly that the techniques applied should be reproducible, or yielding the same results when other researchers scrutinize the same data at a different point in time. As a qualitative tool, there are considerable difficulties of ensuring reliability in qualitative content analysis, especially when the text is coded by only one researcher. Therefore, the research process and the steps taken should be disclosed as openly as possible in order to ensure that other researchers can scrutinize the findings and the process that has led to them. In the following, I will thus give an account of the process of data analysis that I have undertaken.

Validity as the other crucial measuring tool of the social sciences, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which one is actually measuring the concepts one thinks one is, particularly with regard to how well the categorization scheme fits the data and reflects the patterns apparent in the text. I repeatedly compared my data to my analytical concepts in order to ensure compatibility, and also discussed my research and analysis strategy repeatedly with others well acquaintanced with my data and theoretical frame.

Nevertheless, the ultimate assessment of both validity and reliability lies not with me but with the research community at large and those that choose to scrutinize my work.