Research design is a theoretical and procedural plan a scholar follows to address their study question(s). A method is a technique or strategy they employ to fulfill their investigation plan. In other words, a method is part of a research design. That being put into perspective, qualitative content analysis is a method/approach/technique used within the qualitative research design. You could go through the following for in-depth inputs.

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). SAGE. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/research-design/book255675

Selvi, A. F. (2020). Qualitative content analysis. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (1st ed., pp. 440–452). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367824471-37

Good luck,

Hi B Sunil Santha De Silva , I combined qualitative methods action research (French) and microanalysis (Strauss & Corbin) with case study methodology (Flyvbjerg) in chapter 3 of the attached which may help. This approach was favourably commented upon at the viva.

Thesis An analytical tool to aid the reflective selection of equity...

Thank you all for the answers. I am wondering under the qualitative research method, we need to identify a research design such as ethnography, phenomenology etc. After applying these traditional qualitative design, data can be analysed through content analysis. Some have only content analysis rather than getting a qualitative research design as a methodology. I considered content analysis is the only qualitative data analysis method.

No, personally I would not believe that you can use the qualitative content analysis method as a research method or design?

Qualitative design is a methodology and data gathering is your method or technique. Content analysis is only an analytical approaches to analysis your qualitative data, There are various approaches such as, thematic analysis, grounded theory, analysis as well. Now, what analytical approaches you will take; depends on your research questions and objectives. Content analysis would end you up with frequency of categories and no further, whereas thematic analysis asks you for combination of categories into themes. Even you can go further to tell us how themes are related in order to generate a substantive theory or model.

As others have pointed out, qualitative content analysis is a means for analyzing the data, rather than a complete research design. So, you need to match a method for collecting the data with qualitative content analysis in order to have complete design.

As for "approaches" or "traditions" such as ethnography, phenomenology, etc. there is no need to follow one of these unless it is a clear match to your research questions and goals. Instead, the most common format for qualitative research is to combine semi-structured interviews with a form of qualitative content analysis such as Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).