Quantitative content analysis has grown over the course of the last fifty years providing scientific evaluations of the nature of varying program elements in written, print, audio, and visual media. Despite its tremendous utility in communication research, graduate students often express apprehension at learning basic content analytic techniques. This is especially common among students who are fearful of quantitative research methods, or who are apprehensive about their own mathematical abilities. On the other hand, some students who have such apprehensions may actually move toward the method of content analysis due to an erroneous belief that it is not

statistical, not mathematically rigorous, or because they believe it’s easy. This article provides a discussion of the content analytic methods with a few exercises that can be used to teach content analysis and intercoder reliability in a way that does not intimidate those students who may be apprehensive of quantitative methods, but at the same time presents content analytic techniques as sophisticated and rigorous.