Qualitative Content Analysiss

The central idea of Qualitative Content Analysis is to start from the methodological basis of Quantitative Content Analysis (cf. chapter 3.1) but to conceptualize the process of assigning categories to text passages as a qualitative-interpretive act, following content-analytical rules (will be further explained in chapter 4 and 6). In this respect, the Qualitative Content Analysis is a mixed methods approach: assignment of categories to text as qualitative step, working through many text passages and analysis of frequencies of categories as quantitative step. we formulate strict content-analytical rules for the whole process and for the specific steps of analysis. In this respect, our approach is dedicated to the common research criteria approach formulated above. Even if qualitatively oriented studies often work with small samples, with single case studies, they have to describe and give arguments for the sample size and sampling strategy