Records Management and Content Analysis

Written by Michael Brain

There are a few steps that every company needs to take care of in order to maintain good records management. The first step and the most important step before filing your records is content analysis. Content analysis describes and categorizes content in the enterprise that may become records, provides source locations, and describes how the content will move to the records management application.

Content analysis use

Content of your records first needs to be analyzed in order to file those records into appropriate sections. Ole Holsti has created 15 groups of uses for content analysis and they show their purpose in general, what questions they need to answer as well as to which element of communication archetype they apply.

The first use has a purpose of making inferences about the progenitor of communications. It is intended to figure out who is the source, and its use is to answer the question of possible disputed authorship. Once that has moved out of the way the question is why? The answers and uses are:

Secure military and political intelligence
Analyze character of individuals
Infer cultural aspects and change
Provide both legal and evaluative evidence

The second purpose is describing and making assumptions about the aspects of communications. The questions asked are how, what and to whom. The answers are:

How?

Analyze persuasion techniques
Analyze style

What:

Describing communication content trends
Make a connection between familiar characteristics of given sources into messages produced by them
Compare content of communication with standards

To whom:

Connect familiar audience characteristics into produced messages
Describe communication patterns

The last purpose is to interpret the communication consequences. The question is to what effect?

The answer:

Measuring the readability
Analyzing the information flow
Assess communication responses

Although all of this sound quite complicated it is a necessary part of records management. Until you get over this part there is no real records management. As far as the real process of records management with content analysis goes there are six questions that need to be answered in every aspect of content analysis:

What data should be analyzed?
How is the data defined?
From which population are they drawn?
What is the connection between the context and the analyzed data?
What are the analysis boundaries?
What is the deduction target?

The basic concept and of analysis is frequency. Basically the density of some words, similar to keyword density in search engine optimization, is important and they may reflect significant concerns related to communication. So the content analysis begins with counting of words and frequency of keywords, but it extends even beyond that. Homonyms and synonyms are also used to analyze the content of a document.

Next step of content analysis is divided into dictionary based or quantitative and qualitative approach. Dictionary based approach is used to set up a list of categories that are retrieved from the list of frequently repeated words and phrases. They also control the distribution of those words throughout the text. That method is used to transform the observations found into statistical data.

Qualitative content analysis is used for strict implications and intentions of the text. The qualitative analysis allows you to classify the data and order it in groups rather than statistics.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Content Analysis

Advantages:

Looking directly at the communication using transcripts or texts, and in that way it obtains the direct view of the social interaction
It allows qualitative and quantitative operations
Analysis of the text will provide you with very valuable cultural and historical insights over a certain period of time
It will allow you a close relation to the text that can go from specific categories to relationships, it can also statistically analyze a text in coded form
You can use it to interpret a text for any other purpose like the development of specialized expert systems
It is an inconspicuous way to analyze interactions
It will also provide you with an insight into the complex models of language use and human thoughts
If done properly it is the perfect research method

Disadvantages:

It can be time consuming

There is a big room for error, especially when analysis of relations is used in order to attain a larger level of facts interpreted
Sometimes it lacks a theoretical side and it may focus on meaningless issues
One of the biggest disadvantages is reductions over time, especially if you are working with a hard and complex transcript
It relies too much on word count
It can sometimes overlook the context that makes the text

Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of records management you should be aware that all of this is rarely done by people. Nowadays we have different types of software for that, they will save you time and money. Besides that the margin for error is much lower than when it is performed by a human.

The key points of content analysis and the importance of using content analysis in records management.