Content analysis: What are they talking about?
Section snippets
Defining and determining the unit of analysis: a review
Rourke et al. (2001) distinguish five types of units. From large to small they are a message (e-mail or forum contribution), paragraph (section), ‘unit of meaning’ (or thematic unit), sentence (or syntactical unit) and illocution. The most frequently reported units are a message, a ‘unit of meaning’ and the sentence. The definition of a unit of analysis, however, is often vague, which makes it hard to distinguish between them. Veldhuis-Diermanse (2002), for example, defines a ‘unit of meaning’
Developing a content analysis procedure: original approach
The project for which a content analysis procedure was to be developed, is set in higher/distance education in the domain of ‘policy development’. Students collaborate in groups of four. They have to collaboratively write a policy report containing a recommendation on reorganisation of local administration. They communicate only via e-mail. In such asynchronous CSCL settings, where group members are not present at the same time and place, coordination conflicts are very likely to occur (
Developing a content analysis procedure: alternative approach
Reviewing the coded transcripts used for the original procedure revealed that the communication had been subject to ‘unit boundary overlap’. In addition, with respect to the four constraints the research objective focused on an experimental comparison involving ‘manifest variables’. It was also apparent that e-mail communication combined ‘oral’ and ‘telegraphic’ styles: where a pause would occur in natural speech punctuation appeared and compound sentences were a rule rather than an exception.
Discussion and conclusions
The initial aim of the research presented in this article was to develop a procedure for reliable content analysis of electronic communication in the context of project-based learning, however several issues emerged while developing this procedure that are not addressed in most CSCL research, but which have important implications for content analysis methodology and practice.
A review of CSCL 2001, 2002 and 2003 proceedings revealed that a considerable number of reports are vague in their
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Mimi Crijns and Ger Arendsen of the department for management sciences at the Open University of the Netherlands for their support and assistance in gathering the data, as well as Vic Lally (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom) and Maarten De Laat (University of Southampton, United Kingdom and University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) for providing a data sample to conduct the cross-validation of the segmentation procedure.
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