Coding Choices for Textual Analysis: A Comparison of Content Analysis and Map Analysis
Abstract
Content and map analysis, procedures for coding and understanding texts, are described and contrasted. Where content analysis focuses on the extraction of concepts from texts, map analysis focuses on the extraction of both concepts and the relationships among them. Map analysis thus subsumes content analysis. Coding choices that must be made prior to employing content-analytic procedures are enumerated, as are additional coding choices necessary for employing map-analytic procedures. The discussion focuses on general issues that transcend specific software procedures for coding texts from either a content-analytic or map-analytic perspective.
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Existing conceptual analysis methods that merely determine the occurrence of concepts within texts lack emphasis on understanding phenomena to generate theoretical insights.
“Existing conceptual analysis methods that involve merely determining the occurrence of concepts within texts lack the emphasis on understanding phenomena to be able to then generate theoretical insights [59].”
From Navigating the Ethical and Societal Impacts of Generative AI in Higher Computing Education (2025) · cites this paper as [59]
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Navigating the Ethical and Societal Impacts of Generative AI in Higher Computing Education
Mak, J., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., Clear, T., Clear, A., Abluwi, I., Andrei, O., Angeli, L., MacNeil, S., Oyelere, S. S., Hale Rattigan, M., et al. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education · doi:10.1145/3760545.3783975 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
- Authors
- Carley, K.
- Corresponding author
- Carley, Kathleen
- ORCID
- Carley, Kathleen
- Venue
- Sociological Methodology
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1993
- Volume
- 23
- Pages
- 75
- ISSN
- 0081-1750 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1990489265
- Cited by
- 589
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 30 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 28 · 2015: 34 · 2014: 28 · 2013: 21 · 2012: 25
- FWCI
- 16.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Sociological Methodology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
- Social Sciences › Education › Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
- Keywords
- content analysis, map analysis, text coding, concept extraction, relation extraction, qualitative text analysis
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