The paper contains the examination of social and epistemological preconditions of the content analysis. The impact of social factors as well as one of the fashions in the science is stressed. The first section is devoted to epistemological problems concerning the relations among content analysis and the cognitive principles such as objectivity, reliability and validity. The second part deals with the relation between the theory and the empirical research in the case of content analysis. This text exposes introductional considerations for following paper that will be devoted to the clarification of technical research problems related to the content analysis.