Hosts: Dr. Pieter De Wilde & Dr. Christian Rauh - Senior Researchers, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB)

Dates: 19 July (preliminary meeting), 24-25 July (full day)

Course Outline
Text is the most prevalent and easy-to-access type of information about various social
phenomena in time and space. Texts as diverse as speeches, diaries, news reports,
letters, or blogs bear witness of the priorities, positions, demands, or even values and
norms of social actors. However, texts often come in comparatively unstructured form
and require different levels of interpretation in order to extract the systematic
information that social scientists require.

The offered course provides PhD students with a broad overview of content analysis
methods in the social sciences. We discuss basic issues in designing a content analysis
project and then briefly introduce the different approaches and methods that have been
developed and used so far. The aim is to provide students with a broad overview of the
various methodological aspects of content analysis and a range of different forms,
ranging from very qualitative to very quantitative. It enables informed decisions on
whether and how content analysis methodology is suitable for answering students’
respective research questions. Given our own expertise, most applications and examples
will come from political science but we are of course open to take up suggestions from
other disciplines as well.