New techniques of qualitative content analysis – theoretical basis an...

Varioustextual material can occur within psychological research projects: interviewtranscripts, observation protocols, field notes, open-ended questionnaireanswers, documents (e.g. files, webpages). The suggested text analysisprocedures often show a lack of rigor, like hermeneutic approaches or groundedtheory coding. Qualitative ContentAnalysis in contrast tries to analyze texts systematically and controlled byintra- and inter-coder agreement checks. The assignment of categories to textpassages remains interpretive but strictly rule-guided.

Those ruleswithin the content analytical techniques which we have developed and refined(cf. Mayring, 2000; 2014) are based on psychological and psycho-linguistictheories. This contribution tries to elaborate the theoretical background ofthe recent developments and demonstrates the fit for social science textanalysis by giving examples from our research in health psychology.

Psychologyof text processing has differentiated the processes of summarizing texts inlearning situations. Those reductive processes are omission, generalization,construction, integration, selection and grouping. This can be used as basisfor two content analytical techniques: summarizing and inductive categoryformation. Context theories from psycho-linguistics (van Dijk) have differentiatedthe micro-context and the macro-context of text passages, which serve as theunderlying principles of explicative content analysis procedures. Finally the psychologyof categorization (from general psychology and developmental psychology) hasdescribed the basis for processes of everyday categorization of objects. Threeapproaches had been proposed: the definition approach or classical view ofcategorization, the prototype approach and the theory of decision rules. Today categorizationtheorists argue that all three processes are acting together when definingcategories. These theories serve as the basis for deductive category assignmentwithin qualitative content analysis. The text analyst has to formulate for eachcategory explicit definitions, typical examples from the text material, anddemarcation rules to other categories. So every step in qualitative contentanalysis has a theoretical basis in everyday processes of working with texts.

Havingdeveloped categories inductively from the material or having assignedcategories deductively to the text, quantitative analyses of frequencies andcontingencies could be processed. In so far qualitative content analysisrepresents a mixed- methods approach (Mayring, Huber, Guertler &Kiegelmann, 2007).

From the presentedexamples, limitations of the approach in comparison to other social sciencetext analysis approaches are worked out.