Content analysis of social and environmental reports of Italian Cooperative Banks: methodological issues

This paper focuses on content analysis techniques for evaluating the role of non-narrative/visual disclosure in corporate social and environmental reports. The research examines 98 reports from Italian Cooperative Banks using different content analysis techniques to define stakeholder prioritisation, i.e. the total volume of disclosure for each stakeholder. The collected empirical data are used as a tool to address a methodological issue regarding the most appropriate method of quantification in content analysis. The first content analysis performed is based on narrative count, while the second analysis investigates visual count (pictures, graphs, and tables). The final investigation reveals that in determining stakeholder prioritisation, it is possible to neutrally apply content analysis based on narrative or visual counts. However, when discriminating among different categories of stakeholders, the use of narrative as opposed to visual content analysis produced diverse results. The research also found a massive occurrence of visuals in corporate social and environmental reports, which consequently implies that visual disclosure cannot and should not be ignored in content analysis studies.