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Definition

Content analysis is a research method that has been used increasingly in social and health research. Content analysis has been used either as a quantitative or a qualitative research method. Over the years, it expanded from being an objective quantitative description of manifest content to a subjective interpretation of text data dealing with theory generation and the exploration of underlying meaning.

Description

Content analysis is a research method that has been used increasingly in social and health research, including quality of life and well-being. Content analysis has been generally defined as a systematic technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding (Berelson, 1952; Krippendorff, 1980; Weber, 1990). Historically, content analysis was defined as “the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson, 1952, p. 18). Initially, the manifest content was...

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Correspondence to Anat Zaidman-Zait .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Zaidman-Zait, A. (2014). Content Analysis. In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_552

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_552

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0752-8

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