Table 2 Stages of content analysis Steps... | Emerald Publishing

Table 2

Stages of content analysis

Steps	Description
Pre-analysis	Sustainability reports were compiled in digital format, all written in English and made available at the company's corporate website and subjected to skimming reading (exploratory), to get familiar with the content and structure of the documents. The registration unit was defined as the complete textual segment (sentence or paragraph) that conveyed an independent meaning related to one of the analytical indicators. At this stage, we also prepared a list of keywords (like stakeholders, communities, participation, dialog, consultation, conflicts, social and environmental impacts), used as an initial lexical filter to identify potentially relevant excerpts. The keywords did not form analytical categories, serving only as an auxiliary tool to guide the search for registration units
Material exploration (codification)	After identifying the relevant excerpts, each registration unit was subjected to interpretive and coded reading, according to its correspondence with the analytical indicators derived from Brown's (2009) principles. The assignment of codes followed semantic and contextual criteria, considering the discursive content of the excerpts, rather than just the literal occurrence of terms. A single excerpt could be associated with more than one principle, when presenting multiple analytical meanings
Processing of results and inference	Processing of results and inference: after coding, the registers were organized by principle and by reporting year, enabling us to identify patterns of presence, absence, or change of the principles over the analyzed period. Based on this systematization, we carried out a critical interpretation of the findings, associating the empirical evidence with the literature on dialogic accounting and organizational communication

Steps	Description
Pre-analysis	Sustainability reports were compiled in digital format, all written in English and made available at the company's corporate website and subjected to skimming reading (exploratory), to get familiar with the content and structure of the documents. The registration unit was defined as the complete textual segment (sentence or paragraph) that conveyed an independent meaning related to one of the analytical indicators. At this stage, we also prepared a list of keywords (like stakeholders, communities, participation, dialog, consultation, conflicts, social and environmental impacts), used as an initial lexical filter to identify potentially relevant excerpts. The keywords did not form analytical categories, serving only as an auxiliary tool to guide the search for registration units
Material exploration (codification)	After identifying the relevant excerpts, each registration unit was subjected to interpretive and coded reading, according to its correspondence with the analytical indicators derived from Brown's (2009) principles. The assignment of codes followed semantic and contextual criteria, considering the discursive content of the excerpts, rather than just the literal occurrence of terms. A single excerpt could be associated with more than one principle, when presenting multiple analytical meanings
Processing of results and inference	Processing of results and inference: after coding, the registers were organized by principle and by reporting year, enabling us to identify patterns of presence, absence, or change of the principles over the analyzed period. Based on this systematization, we carried out a critical interpretation of the findings, associating the empirical evidence with the literature on dialogic accounting and organizational communication