Okay, when you want to conduct a Content analysis you need
a set of criteria to actually look at your qualitative data.
In this case,
we're going to look at written qualitative research.
The first thing you need to do is really understand the context of a situation so
let's go by example in this case we're looking at a question that was posted on ResearchGate and the
question is why is it so easy to cultivate and support myths and false models in education and
then there's a description in there and you would read that description then you would
have to understand what's the purpose and the purpose of this content analysis to develop an
understanding of what is a quality post in an academic discussion so that's our goal so we
understand our goal and then we might brainstorm criteria and come up with criteria and take a look
at posts and sort of figure out what's a good post what is an effective post so then we would
create a spreadsheet all right and before you do anything in the spreadsheet you want to be
able to format it correctly because these are long posts here and so I'm going to click in the middle
here you see the ABC and the one two and and so that could the intersection there I'm going to
right click on that and then so that means I've selected all the cells and then I'm just going
to bring this in here show you that I what I want to do is make sure that everything is top aligned
and I want text wrapping and that way the text is nicely in one cell here alright so I'm setting up
a little spreadsheet what I've done is copied a post in here step one and then I've given it an
ID so that ID is number one participant one is posted this all right I'm going to take a look
at that and then what I'm going to do and I'll move this over here is is set up some criteria
to evaluate the post so I've just chosen for this example the length of the post connect whether the
person is connecting with other messages the quality of the post in that case I'm referring
to the quality of writing the criteria for whether it's focused in criteria five whether
it's evidence-based what I've done and I'll just show you is here four criteria one I've said one
is a very short message and five is a very long message so I'm analyzing this all right and so
here I am going to add a comment here and connect so one is no connection to other messages and to
bracket five is connect to multiple messages okay and so there each one of these reminds me of the
criteria when I rated so I right clicked and added my criteria for each of these and perhaps
I've written on a piece of paper what they mean I in terms of so connect might be connect to one
other message or sorry no connection to any other message connection to one to multiple
messages depends maybe I don't want to range from one to five in terms of my rating but so here we
go I'm developing my rating system so I'm going to look at length here maybe I've already established
that this is a four in a long message alright but it's a good idea for me to right-click and
then insert a comment explaining why because the explanations are important so here my reasoning I
put it up here let me just show you is it's much longer than most messages two paragraphs is the
max it's not clear theme it's too much verbiage and I might even give them some examples so I
want to have criteria here I might even do a word count that's possible but I'm going
to assess this posting in the quality based on my criteria so here's the connection criteria
and so I might look at this as mentioned he's connecting to the question--my Robin but nobody
else so perhaps it's not a connection to no one it's just connection to the author so it's a
connection one terms of quality I might language quality we're going to say you know low writing
quality to high writing quality so I might say oh this is a reasonable quality of writing and
then you know for each criteria I'm going to give it a label and then what I would do is rate all
the messages and get a sense and I might go back and forth saying okay wait a second I
may be rated this too high or this too or too low okay so you develop this criteria on your own and
then you do your ratings and that's how you can start a content analysis now I would take notes
on the side or in word always rationalizing why I made the decisions I did because that's
important your decision shouldn't just be a gut feel it should be based on strict criteria