Abstract

In historical accounts of mass communication research, the term qualitative content analysis is sometimes linked with the name of Siegfried Kracauer, the German sociologist and cultural critic who moved to the USA as a refugee in the late 1930s and later established himself as an important film theorist in the 1940s and 1950s. Kracauer may not have been the first to use the term, but he did indeed write what may be regarded as the manifesto of qualitative content analysis. In “The challenge of qualitative content analysis” (1953), Kracauer dealt a severe blow to the type of quantitative content analysis practiced by many contemporary mass communication researchers, and instead made a plea for qualitative, hermeneutic, or humanistic procedures. While the article is rooted in the author’s own analytical and political experiences in the context of the Frankfurt School and in the works of fellow refugees such as Theodor Adorno and Leo Lowenthal, there is a clear continuity of Kracauer’s argument with later and current debates on the relevance of qualitative approaches to media content. Thus, the article offers a useful framework for considering some general principles and issues of textual analysis of fictional media content.