Multimodal content analysis: expanding analytical approaches to content analysis

Abstract

Research methods and analytical approaches that support inquiry in the social sciences need to respond to continual changes in the theoretical frameworks, research methods, and technologies used to support data collection and analysis in contemporary research frameworks. This article describes a variation of qualitative content analysis, termed ‘multimodal content analysis’, that draws upon previous iterations of qualitative content analysis, interpretivist research designs, deductive and inductive reasoning, qualitative data collection and analysis methods, and theories of multimodality for conceptualizing and analyzing a selected corpus of multimodal phenomena. In addition, the analysis of selected commercial wine labels is presented to offer researchers an example of multimodal content analysis to guide future research and open up a dialogue focusing on the potential advantages and challenges to researching multimodal phenomena.