Without analysing the text in a book, you cannot understand the actual meaning and views of authors. Book analysis helps us improve our word choice, write a review on a specific book, and critically analyse the quality of information to use as source material in our research and dissertation. Furthermore, critical analysis helps researchers clearly understand an issue. To align literary work, you must connect things such as reflection, debates, and quality ideas together. There are a number of qualitative analysis methods that can make you master of all these important skills by book analysis. This article will throw light on different qualitative analysis methods that you can use for book analysis.
Qualitative analysis that is applicable for book analysis:
Qualitative analysis refers to the evaluation of non-numerical information. This non-numerical or textual information may include interviews, notes, videos, audios, images and, of course book’s text. Basically, the qualitative analysis can be done in five ways: content analysis, narrative analysis, discourse analysis, grounded theory analysis, and framework analysis. Let us briefly discuss all these qualitative analysis methods to see how they are helpful in book analysis:
Content analysis:
It includes the process of categorising verbal or behavioural data to summarise and classify it. It usually works by determining the presence of certain concepts, themes and words within the qualitative dataset.
Framework analysis:
Framework analysis is another form of thematic analysis that determines an organised structure of deductively and inductively derived themes.
Discourse analysis:
Discourse analysis is an approach to studying how language shapes reality. It is a method that analyses the structure of text or statement that contains more than one sentence.
Narrative analysis:
In qualitative analysis, the narrative analysis is important to identify the meaning and kind of stories that authors use to clear their point of view. In more simple words, the textual data in the story is the subject of narrative analysis. If you are not sure how to use narrative analysis, you can hire PhD dissertation writing services.
Grounded theory analysis:
Grounded theory analysis is the type of qualitative analysis that allows you to study a particular phenomenon to discover new theories based on real-world data collection. From the brief description of five types of qualitative analysis, we can say that three out of these five methods can work well for the book analysis. These three methods include discourse analysis, narrative analysis and content analysis. However, the grounded theory analysis and framework analysis have very little or no application in the field of book analysis. Let us prove our claim:
Content analysis and book analysis:
Content analysis can help readers to identify the pattern in the information recorded in a book. Books are an important source of material and content analysis is valuable to analyse or interpret the information in the books. You can use content analysis to find the meaning, purpose, and effect of text present in a book of your interest. It is also important to make the interface related to the author or audience of the text. It involves the quantification of certain things, concepts, phrases, and subjects to better interpret the context. If you want to use the content analysis to refine and use the material in your research, you must first ask some questions relevant to your goals of study. After that, you can use the following steps to analyse a book using content analysis- a qualitative analysis method:
- Select the book you want to analyse
- Clearly note down the categories and units for analysis
- Develop rules for coding
- Code the text as per the rules you formed
- Analyse results and extract the conclusion
Discourse analysis and book analysis:
As a matter of course, discourse analysis is a method of studying the written and spoken language in the framework of social context. Basically, its purpose is to understand how to use language in a real word life. It aims to find the purpose and effect of different types of languages. It focuses on cultural rules, values, briefs, and assumptions to relate them to the political, historical and social context. Thus, discourse analysis is probably the best qualitative analysis method to analyse the text in a book.
Unlike other linguistics approaches, discourse analysis only focuses on the rule of language. If you analyse a book using this method of analysis, you will be able to only study the contextual meaning of the language. Moreover, you can follow the following steps to conduct an analysis on book of your choice:
- Define research questions after selecting the book to be analysed
- Research a relevant theory and information on the context
- Make themes and observe a pattern in the content
- Categorise data into social, political and cultural groups
- Interpret results and draw conclusions
Narrative analysis and book analysis:
Narrative analysis helps us understand how the author of a book creates a story to clear his stance on a topic of discussion. It comprises a dual layer of interpretation. It simply means you first have to note how the author creates a story and then use your own experience to extract logical meaning out of the first part of this analysis. Not only in books, but you can also use narrative analysis to better under the meaning of the text in magazines, newspapers, autobiographies, and many more. You can use the following steps to conduct a narrative analysis on the book of your interest:
- Code the book to be analysed using narrative analysis method
- Groups and Read live events in the book
- Design nested story structure codes
- Deeply involved in to the story
- Compare different parts of the story structure
- Explain the core narrative
Framework analysis and grounded theory analysis are quite complicated types of the qualitative method of study. One involves theming, while the other includes formation of a story. Thus, these two methods have little application in the book analysis.
Final thoughts:
As a matter of fact, we can conclude that a variety of qualitative analysis methods help in a book analysis. Among five prominent types of qualitative designs content analysis, discourse analysis and narrative analysis have greater application in the book analysis. However, the framework analysis and grounded theory analysis have limited or no application as far as analysis of a book is concerned. In the big picture, all these analysis methods have their own pros and cons, but you should select the one that best suits the longer goals for conducting book analysis.
