What is Content Analysis???

The author's study uses a variety of qualitative approaches. Qualitative research includes interviews, participant observation, surveys and content analysis (CA) on archival documents through secondary data which is in the form of weblogs. In qualitative research, the problem is unstructured and that is the reason why the qualitative technique is more efficient (Rasli, 2005). For the mode of analysis of this research, content analysis is applied through the Hermeunetic Theory. Hermeunetic Theory is based on interpretive philosophy and is used for interpreting meanings of text-analogue (Myers, 1997). The reason for this, because of the researcher interprets the text of meanings from the entries in the subject’s weblogs for both Study 1 which are Malaysian undergraduate students located in Manchester, United Kingdom and Study 2 which are Malaysian undergraduate students located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Based on Neuman (2006), content analysis is a technique used to gather and analyse the content of text. It refers to communicated words, meanings, pictures, symbols, ideas, themes or any message. The text can be communication from written, visual or spoken media. For example, it can be from books, newspapers or magazine articles, advertisements, speeches, official documents, films or videotapes, musical lyrics, photographs, articles of clothing or works of art.

Furthermore, content analysis is non-reactive analysis because the process will not be influenced by the process of placing words, messages or symbols by the researcher who analyses the content (Neuman, 2006). Content analysis can also allow the researcher to summarise the content, such as messages or meaning, in a source of communication. In addition, with content analysis, a researcher may compare and analyse content across many texts. It can be done by qualitative techniques using charts or tables, and it shows that content analysis simplifies the aspects of the text’s content that are hard to see (Neuman, 2006).