Epistemología, metodología y técnicas del análisis de contenido José Luis Piñuel Raigada Universidad Complutense de Madrid Departamento de Sociología IV Facultad de CC. de la Información Universidad Complutense de Madrid Ciudad Universitaria, s/n 28040 - Madrid, Spain pinuel@ccinf.ucm.es Title: Epistemology, methodology and content analysis techniques Abstract It is exposed, first, an epistemological review of the analysis of content, as scientific practice in social sciences that studies an object (v.g. a singular communication) for whose representa- tion (scientific and refutable therefore) it is used the selection procedure and analysis of com- municative products that belong objectively to that communication that are significant to know it from a theoretical perspective, and that they are valid or pertinent to put on approval the conditions, so much general as matters, for those that these communicative products have been elaborated, or that they can be it, in any communication type similar to the one that has produced them. In second place the method is examined (the procedure rules) that aspires to tie in a valid way the succession of performances that concern to the selection of the corpus, to its segmentation in analysis units and to its exam to elaborate, to register and to treat data of diverse logical orders, thanks to which it is elaborated a speeches able to represent scientifical- ly (or in a refutable way) to the study object that is not the own corpus, but the human practice that has engendered the material object of the analysis: the analyzed communicative product. In third place, the last section exposes the technical alternatives that underlie to any analysis procedure, so much if it is carried out in all its steps by the investigators and analysts, as if it is carried out automatically by the available resources of software, and shortly described fol- lowing the work of Harald Klein. Key words: content analysis, communication theory, epistemology of knowledge, sociolin- guistics, psycholinguistics. Copyright © Estudios de Sociolingüística 3(1), 2002, pp. 1-42