I also found a Krippendorff's book on content analysis really helpful. It gives me the academic/theoretical support of what I want to do. Here is a conceptual process of my research methodology:
Krippendorff identifies that in content analysis, there are three types of units:
- Sampling unit - units of selection; what documents are going to be sampled and analysed? (i.e. CPD, evaluation report)
- Coding unit - units of description; what is going to be coded/measured/analysed? (i.e. textual presence of risk management, mentions of programme success)
- Context unit - units that delineate the scope for coders in recording the coding units; what context is the coding unit coded? (i.e. the logframe is a context unit, textual presence of risk management is the coding unit)
The examples above are working definitions of my units of analysis, I still have to work on clarifying them.
As for my sampling, it is clear that I'm using relevance sampling:
"Relevance sampling is non-probabilistic. In using this form of sampling, an analyst proceeds by following a conceptual hierarchy, systematically lowering the number of units that need to be considered for an analysis. The resulting units of text are not meant to be representative of a population of texts; rather, they are the population of relevant texts." (Krippendorff, 2004)----
References:
GRAY, D. E. 2009. Doing research in the real world, London,
SAGE.
KRIPPENDORFF, K. 2004. Content analysis : an introduction to its
methodology, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage.
KRIPPENDORFF, K. & BOCK, M. A. 2009. The content analysis reader, Thousand
Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications.
Your research design is looking solid. :)
ReplyDeleteI think the components of the content analysis makes good sense, I hope it will be helpful to you in your research.
Let the data collection begin... hehehe