back to the Publication Alerts menuFranzosi, Roberto P. From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Franzosi details his linguistic approach to content analysis, comparing it to other approaches, tracing its development, and describing the computer tools he has developed to support his research. From the book jacket: "This book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in sociohistorical research." The book runs more than 400 pages in length, affording Franzosi space to discuss in depth a variety of historical, theoretical, and methodological issues in content analysis.
Franzosi, Roberto P. "Content Analysis." In Handbook of Data Analysis, edited by Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman, 547-565. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Franzosi discusses and champions referential content analysis, that is, research that aims to assess text features (e.g., words, phrases) in their linguistic context. Franzosi notes that "the emphasis of referential content analysis on the way actors, actions, and events are portrayed (or referred to) in a text gets content analysis closer to qualitative forms of textual analysis more attentive to language and more prominent in sociology: from frame analysis to discourse analysis and narrative analysis" (p. 553).