Hi everybody. Note that English is not my first language. I have two question. 1) Does the qualitative content analysis necessarily involve a quantification of something like the number of references, the number of participants contributing to a category or other? 2) I would also like your opinion as to whether this text: Sandelowski, M. (2000). Whatever happened to qualitative description ?. Research in nursing & health, 23 (4), 334-340 proposes a methodology as such or something else as some guidelines or orientation but not a methodology to follow.
Qualitative data analysis can be don by coding, analyzing yourself, e.g. in Atlas.ti or do it by printing the data and analyze it. You do not necessarily need quantification for qualitative data analysis.
To your first question yes, it is very detailed and time consuming depending on how many participants they have and your collected data. You will have code by hand or using a program. NVivo, MAXQDA, CAT, ATLAS.ti. On the second question, the descriptive was classified as a design that is now becoming popular. Descriptive to me is an umbrella term since qual in itself is quite descriptive. I am going to make it my business to learn more about it.
Respected Luc Dargis, very important question, as I have to go similar types of difficulties while my research thesis was qualitative based; many questions were unanswered or ambigous answers were present. For example, qualitative descriptive design terminology, we usually do not find in text books as a qualitative design, but many studies who explores very basic kind of exploratory phenomenon carries the design, qualitative descriptive or qualitative exploratory (while reading the articles of qualitative nature that design is mentioned); books to reference:
(Polit, D. F., & Beck, C. T. (2008). Nursing research: Generating and assessing evidence for nursing practice. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins)
(Burns, N., & Grove, S. K. (2010). Understanding nursing research: Building an evidence-based practice. Elsevier Health Sciences). Quantification of partricipants is based on saturation; means if repeated similar responses are occuring, then we stop collecting data as purposive sampling technique helps in achieving saturation with less sample size, almost saturation achieves with 12 to 14 participants; sometimes less than 12 or 14 participants can serve the purpose.
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