Content analysis Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication.

Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws." According to Dr. Farooq Joubish, content analysis is considered a scholarly meth odology in the humanities by which texts are studied as to authorship, authentic ity, or meaning. This latter subject include philology, hermeneutics, and semiot ics. Harold Lasswell formulated the core questions of content analysis: "Who says wha t, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect?." Ole Holsti (1969) offers a broad definition of content analysis as "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messa ges." Kimberly A. Neuendorf (2002, p. 10) offers a six-part definition of conten t analysis: "Content analysis is a summarising, quantitative analysis of messages that relie s on the scientific method (including attention to objectivity, intersubjectivit y, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalisability, replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented." Description In 1931, Alfred R Lindesmith developed a methodology to refute existing hypothes es, which became known as a content analysis technique, and it gained popularity in the 1960s by Glaser and is referred to as The Constant Comparative Method of Qu alitative Analysis in an article published in 1964-65. Glaser and Strauss (1967) re ferred to their adaptation of it as Grounded Theory." The method of content analysi s enables the researcher to include large amounts of textual information and sys tematically identify its properties, e.g. the frequencies of most used keywords (KWIC meaning "Key Word in Context") by locating the more important structures o f its communication content. Yet such amounts of textual information must be cat egorised analysis, providing at the end a meaningful reading of content under sc rutiny. David Robertson (1976:73-75) for example created a coding frame for a co mparison of modes of party competition between British and American parties. It was developed further in 1979 by the Manifesto Research Group aiming at a compar ative content-analytic approach on the policy positions of political parties. Since the 1980s, content analysis has become an increasingly important tool in t he measurement of success in public relations (notably media relations) programs and the assessment of media profiles. In these circumstances, content analysis is an element of media evaluation or media analysis. In analyses of this type, d ata from content analysis is usually combined with media data (circulation, read ership, number of viewers and listeners, frequency of publication). It has also been used by futurists to identify trends. In 1982, John Naisbitt published his popular Megatrends, based on content analysis in the US media. The creation of coding frames is intrinsically related to a creative approach to variables that exert an influence over textual content. In political analysis, these variables could be political scandals, the impact of public opinion polls, sudden events in external politics, inflation etc. Mimetic Convergence, created by F. Lampreia Carvalho for the comparative analysis of electoral proclamations on free-to-air television is an example of creative articulation of variables i n content analysis. The methodology describes the construction of party identiti es during long-term party competitions on TV, from a dynamic perspective, govern ed by the logic of the contingent. This method aims to capture the contingent lo gic observed in electoral campaigns by focusing on the repetition and innovation of themes sustained in party broadcasts. According to such post-structuralist p erspective from which electoral competition is analysed, the party identities, ' the real' cannot speak without mediations because there is not a natural centre fixing the meaning of a party structure, it rather depends on ad-hoc articulatio ns. There is no empirical reality outside articulations of meaning. Reality is a n outcome of power struggles that unify ideas of social structure as a result of contingent interventions. In Brazil, these contingent interventions have proven to be mimetic and convergent rather than divergent and polarised, being integra

l to the repetition of dichotomised worldviews. Mimetic Convergence thus aims to show the process of fixation of meaning through discursive articulations that repeat, alter and subvert political issues that c ome into play. For this reason, parties are not taken as the pure expression of conflicts for the representation of interests (of different classes, religions, ethnic groups (see: Lipset & Rokkan 1967, Lijphart 1984) but attempts to recompo se and re-articulate ideas of an absent totality around signifiers gaining posit ivity. Every content analysis should depart from a hypothesis. The hypothesis of Mimeti c Convergence supports the Downsian interpretation that in general, rational vot ers converge in the direction of uniform positions in most thematic dimensions. The hypothesis guiding the analysis of Mimetic Convergence between political par ties' broadcasts is: 'public opinion polls on vote intention, published througho ut campaigns on TV will contribute to successive revisions of candidates' discou rses. Candidates re-orient their arguments and thematic selections in part by th e signals sent by voters. One must also consider the interference of other kinds of input on electoral propaganda such as internal and external political crises and the arbitrary interference of private interests on the dispute. Moments of internal crisis in disputes between candidates might result from the exhaustion of a certain strategy. The moments of exhaustion might consequently precipitate an inversion in the thematic flux. As an evaluation approach, content analysis is considered by some to be quasi-ev aluation because content analysis judgments need not be based on value statement s if the research objective is aimed at presenting subjective experiences. Thus, they can be based on knowledge of everyday lived experiences. Such content anal yses are not evaluations. On the other hand, when content analysis judgments are based on values, such studies are evaluations (Frisbie, 1986). As demonstrated above, only a good scientific hypothesis can lead to the develop ment of a methodology that will allow the empirical description, be it dynamic o r static. Content analysis. This is a closely related if not overlapping kind, often inclu and used primarily in the social ded under the general rubric of qualitative analysis, sciences. It is a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of t ext into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding (Stemler 2001). It often involves building and applying a concept dictionary or fixed vocabulary of t erms on the basis of which words are extracted from the textual data for concord ing or statistical computation.