This work provides descriptions and illustrations of text analysis methods for communication and marketing research; cultural, historical-comparative and event analysis; curriculum evaluation; psychological diagnosis; language development research; and for any research in which statistical inferences are drawn from samples of texts. The book is accessible to readers with no experience of content analysis, as well as the text analysis expert. In particular, this collection describes developments in semantic and network text analysis methodologies. The book's international and cross-disciplinary content illustrates the breadth of quantitative text analysis applications. These applications demonstrate the methods' utility for international research, as well as for practitioners from the fields of sociology, political science, journalism/communication, computer science, marketing, education and English. This is an "ecumenical" collection that contains applications not only of recent semantic and network text analysis methods, but also of the more traditional thematic method of text analysis.
In fact, it is originally with this volume that these two "relational" approaches to text analysis are defined and contrasted with more traditional "thematic" text analysis methods. The emphasis here is on application. The book's chapters provide guidance regarding the sorts of inferences that each method affords, and updated desriptions of the human and technological resources required to apply the methods. Its purpose is as a resource for making quantitative text analysis methods more accessible to social science researchers.