Content Analysis and Literary Criticism in Children's Literature

Content analysis and literary criticism are often applied in literary researches، specifically children''s literature. Nowadays in many of these researches content analysis is applied with two approaches: Qualitative and quantitative. It seems that qualitative approach in content analysis is similar to literary criticism as a very common approach in literary researches. In this survey 75 research reports have been studied which have been published in Iranian Children''s Literature Studies and the research reports which are available in International Youth Library in Munich. 41 of these researches have criticized and analyzed texts. Some of them have mentioned content analysis as a «Method» and some of them have emphasized on the analytical «Aspect» of their research. Meanwhile it is not easy to differentiate between «Methods» and «Approaches» which have been applied in these researches and many of them have been done through qualitative and analytical approaches based on different types of literary criticism such as Constructivism and Feminism. The utilization of content analysis methods based on literary criticism criteria can be helpful for developing of children''s literature researches.