Content Analysis Approaches and methods in Iranian Nursing Studies: A Narrative Review Study

Content analysis (CA) is a widely used to extract the meanings in qualitative studies. Different approaches and methods have been used to perform CA in nursing studies, and their identification can support the selection of an appropriate method in future research. Therefore, the present narrative review examined the approaches and methods used to analyze contents performed by Iranian nurses.

The current study is a narrative review that was conducted in the two stages. In the first stage, in order to achieve the types and frequency of CA approaches and methods, Persian and English databases were searched without time limit until January 2022. In the second step, after identifying them, by referring to the texts where each of the approaches and methods were comprehensively explained, we determined their characteristics, including the number of steps and the details of each one.

The results showed the most used CA approach was the inductive of Granheim and Lundman (135 articles, 43.97%). There were also studies (111 articles, 36.16%) used the inductive approach; But they did not mention their method. Myring's method had the most variety in terms of different (nine) CA. Hsieh and Shannon have also proposed three inductive, deductive, and summative approaches to perform the CA.

The results found both the inductive and deductive approaches and the eight different methods were used by the Iranian nurse researchers for CA. Although the methods such as Graneheim and Lundman, Elo and Kyngas and Hsieh and Shannon have been most used by the researchers, it seems Myring's method can pay more attention from researchers due to the variety of CA.