This paper illustrates the use of content analysis as a research method within the social sciences. My study of the emergence of employee assistance as a workplace jurisdiction provided me an opportunity to demonstrate the deftness of this research method in doing inter-population and intra-population comparisons in a manner that conflates both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Content analysis, previously undervalued for its purported inability to explain meaningfully oriented social behaviors, has in recent years become resurgent as scholars investigating large volumes of written and spoken materials from diverse sources have discovered its usefulness in organizing and conceptually analyzing such materials. In this paper, I content analyzed periodicals in the employee assistance field to assess the extent to which the field had coalesced. The data revealed that the periodicals in the field had converged in their basic thrusts, and that the dominant problems were alcohol and other drugs, problems traditionally addressed by the employee assistance field. Employee assistance emerged in the 1970s to assist troubled workers in organizations. Since then, the field continues to vie for recognition as a full-fledged occupation.