Quantitative Content Analysis of the Visual

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of quantitative visual content analysis as a method, how it can support scholars in answering certain research problems or questions and how to circumvent its shortcomings through robust design and the use of complementary combined methods. I hope to show that content analysis helps us to examine important questions of ideological influence and the ways in which particular versions of reality are constructed and fashioned over time and across a variety of media. I explore the appropriate applications for such a systematic approach to a diverse range of visual media content, illustrated with examples from the methods literature and archetypal studies.