Content analysis is a research technique focused on the content and internal features of media. It is used to determine the presence of certain words, concepts, themes, phrases, characters, or sentences within texts or sets of texts and to quantify this presence in an objective manner.

Due to the fact that it can be applied to examine any piece of writing or occurrence of recorded communication, content analysis is used in a large number of fields.

There are two general categories of content analysis:

• Conceptual analysis: establishing the existence and frequency of concepts in a text
• Relational analysis: builds on conceptual analysis by examining the relationships among concepts in a text

Related methods include Collating, stemmatics and Stylometrics.