Epistemology, methodology and content analysis techniques

Abstract

It is exposed, first, an epistemological review of the analysis of content, as scientific practice in social sciences that studies an object (v.g. a singular communication) for whose representation (scientific and refutable therefore) it is used the selection procedure and analysis of communicative products that belong objectively to that communication that are significant to know it from a theoretical perspective, and that they are valid or pertinent to put on approval the conditions, so much general as matters, for those that these communicative products have been elaborated, or that they can be it, in any communication type similar to the one that has produced them. In second place the method is examined (the procedure rules) that aspires to tie in a valid way the succession of performances that concern to the selection of the corpus, to its segmentation in analysis units and to its exam to elaborate, to register and to treat data of diverse logical orders, thanks to which it is elaborated a speeches able to represent scientifically (or in a refutable way) to the study object that is not the own corpus, but the human practice that has engendered the material object of the analysis: the analyzed communicative product. In third place, the last section exposes the technical alternatives that underlie to any analysis procedure, so much if it is carried out in all its steps by the investigators and analysts, as if it is carried out automatically by the available resources of software, and shortly described following the work of Harald Klein.