The following includes excerpts from Section 1 and Section 4 in “A Quality Approach to Qualitative Content Analysis: Similarities and Differences Compared to Other Qualitative Methods” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20(3), Art. 31. The Table of Contents for the entire FQS special issue on qualitative content analysis can be found here.

1. Introduction

Scholarly discourse about what it means to collect and analyze qualitative data is a dynamic discussion in the qualitative community. At the center of this discourse is the shared understanding that qualitative research involves the examination of nuanced connections, along with the social and contextual dimensions, that give meaning to qualitative data. Qualitative researchers strive to discover these nuanced connections and contextual dimensions with all methods, and most assuredly with qualitative content analysis (QCA) (ELO & KYNGÄS, 2008; GRANEHEIM & LUNDMAN, 2004; HSIEH & SHANNON, 2005; LATTER, YERRELL, RYCROFT-MALONE & SHAW, 2000; SCHREIER, 2012; TOWNSEND, AMARSI, BACKMAN, COX & LI, 2011). Yet, in every instance, qualitative researchers are presented with the challenge of conceptualizing and implementing research designs that result in rich contextual data, while also incorporating principles of quality research to maximize the discovery of valid interpretations that lead to the ultimate usefulness (i.e., the “so what?”) of their  research.

In this article I discuss what makes QCA similar to and different from other qualitative research methods from the standpoint of a quality approach. In order to establish the basis from which quality concerns can be discussed, I begin with defining the QCA method (Section 2) and, in so doing, identifying the fundamental similarities and differences between QCA and other methods (Section 3) from the perspective of the ten unique attributes of qualitative research (ROLLER & LAVRAKAS, 2015). With this as a foundation, I continue with a brief contextual discussion of a quality approach to qualitative research and the QCA method (Section 4), followed by an introduction to one such approach, i.e., the total quality framework (TQF) (ibid.), in which I give researchers a way to think about quality design throughout each phase of the qualitative research process (Section 5). With these preparatory sections—defining and contrasting the QCA method with other qualitative methods, discussing quality approaches, and a brief description of the TQF approach—I lay the necessary groundwork for a meaningful discussion Read Full Text