The Importance Of Content Analysis

For the purpose of this study, CSR will work as the main independent variable. I assess this via content analysis. Content analysis is a widely used method in the analysis of non-financial reports. (Giannarakis et al., 2011). Guthrie and Abeysekera (2006) define that content analysis correspond to the technic of codifying qualitative and quantitative into pre-defined categories. This method allows researchers to obtain patterns in recording and presenting information. In a similar way, Krippendorff (2004) defends that content analysis allows making inferences, since it legitimates the transformation of raw information into usable one. To better understand content analysis it is important to consider what it means to have qualitative and quantitative

In the end the quantitative approach will transform such items into quantitative statistical data. (Giannarakis et al., 2011). The quantitative approach can have a considerable drawback since it might happen that those pages include graphs with no relevant information on social activities, or that sentence and word counting miss relevant information presented in tables and graphs (Singh, 2014). In the qualitative approach we first identify environmentally relevant issues and only after are the environmental disclosures analyzed, through the use of a score. Qualitative approach is more connected to analyse the intentionality of elements and parts of texts and the implications they have.
Content analysis also has drawbacks. Cochran & Wood (1984) state that this method is merely a snapshot of what the firm claims to be and as such scepticism has to be incorporated when analysing the data obtained. Nevertheless, it is a relatively easy method to apply, since it is very objective and allows the analysis of considerably big sizes of information. Patten and Crampton (2004) classify content analysis as the most straightforward method to identify if a company presents social responsible information in their official documents or

This software allows me to assess the extension of CSR reporting in a firm’s annual report. Firstly, the number of times a pre-defined CSR keyword (Appendix 1) appears in my sample unit will be calculated. The CSR keyword used for this study is the same one used by Wang and Bansal. Following the same approach of Wang and Bansal (2012), I do not distinguish different forms of the same word or count different tenses of the same word separately. In order to have robustness in the analysis, a manual check is performed on a sample of the data to make sure that the identified keywords are connected with CSR. After discovering the frequency of each distinct keyword, the level of CSR disclosure is estimated through the following