A low effort approach to quantitative content analysis

Abstract

We propose a workflow for an individual sociologist to be able to use quantitative content analysis in small-scale short-term research projects. The key idea of the approach is to generate a domain-oriented dictionary for researchers with limited resources. The workflow starts like a typical one and then deviates to include content analysis. First, the researcher performs deductive analysis which results in an interview guide. Second, the researcher conducts the small number of interviews to collect a domain-oriented labelled text corpus. Third, a domain-oriented dictionary is generated for the following content analysis. We propose and compare a number of methods to automatically extract a domain-oriented dictionary from a labelled corpus. Some properties of the proposed workflow are empirically studied based on a sociological research on volunteering in Russia.