Computerized Content Analysis in Management Research: A Demonstration of Advantages & Limitations

Content analysis is a research technique used to objectively and systematically make inferences about the intentions, attitudes, and values of individuals by identifying specified characteristics in textual messages. The unobtrusive nature of content analysis makes it well suited for strategic management research. To date, the content analyses in most management studies have been performed by human coders, despite advances in computer technology that enable researchers to perform the same analyses more reliably and less expensively. In this paper, the investigator compares human-coded content analysis to computerized coding of the same text communications. The results suggest the two methods may be equally effective. Differences in results obtained using different units of analysis (such as analysis by sentence, by paragraph or by whole document) are also examined. Better reliability, improved stability, and comparability of results suggest more extensive use of computerized content analysis in future research.