Using content analysis as a research method to inquire into intellectual capital reporting

TLDR

Researchers studying intellectual capital must justify their data‑collection methods, and content analysis is the most widely used approach for examining intellectual capital reporting. This paper reviews content analysis as a method for studying intellectual capital reporting and discusses methodological issues from social environmental accounting that are relevant to current ICR research. The authors conduct a literature review of content analysis applications in ICR and analyze methodological concerns from related fields. The study identifies developmental challenges in applying content analysis to voluntary intellectual capital disclosure in annual reports and proposes two theoretical foundations that justify the method’s suitability.

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers in the field of intellectual capital (IC) need to be able to justify the specific research methods they use to collect the empirical data that they examine to support and test opinions regarding the merit of different approaches to managing and reporting IC. Of the various methods available to researchers seeking to understand intellectual capital reporting (ICR), content analysis is the most popular. The aim of this paper is to review the use of content analysis as a research method in understanding ICR and to offer some observations on the practical utility of the method. Further, the paper examines several research method issues relating to the use of content analysis that have been discussed in the social environmental accounting literature, but not as yet in the IC literature, which we believe are relevant to investigations underway in the field of ICR. This paper reports on several developmental issues we have confronted when using content analysis to examine the voluntary disclosure of IC in annual reports by various organisations. The paper also suggests two theoretical foundations for further investigation into the voluntary disclosure of IC by organisations, and suggests why content analysis is well matched to both these theories as a means to collect empirical data to test research propositions.