Keyword – Siegfried Kracauer

Sebestyén, Attila:

Kracauer’s Quality: The “Humanistic” Approach of Content Analysis

This paper focuses on Siegfried Kracauer’s essay on qualitative content analysis published in the mid-20th century. It offers a brief overview of the complexity of the author’s oeuvre which was first forgotten and then rediscovered by posterity. More particularly, it asks the question of how Kracauer preserved his ‘humanistic’ way of thinking and his sense for the tensions of meaning in the founding era of communication and media studies dominated by the social sciences. This study looks into the conceptual level of content analysis but does not examine an actual corpus as it it does not seek to apply the methodological insights practically and immediately, which is to be done in another paper.

Keywords: history of communication and media research, humanistic approach, methodological reflection, qualitative content analysis, Siegfried Kracauer