This article aims to present a Mixed Integrative Heuristic Approach (MIHA) for image studies based on textual content (media news) analysis. MIHA was developed during an exploratory study on the image of China and the Chinese in Zambia and Angola. The analyzed database was relatively small (2477 articles), and the material was very heterogeneous, because of the wide scope of topics covered by the texts and the fact that we analyzed content from both English- and Portuguese-language media. To obtain the best possible results, we decided to employ the mixed methods approach for a bottom-up created dictionary, and to design a set of sentiment indexes based on both automatic and manual coding. This paper focuses on the two most important steps of the method development: dictionary building and sentiment indexes design.