Introduction

Krippendorff (2004, p. 18) defined content analysis as ’a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use’. The goal is to link the results to their context or to the environment in which they were produced (Bengtsson, 2016, p. 9).

Тhe purpose of content analysis is to organize and elicit meaning from the data collected, and draw realistic conclusions from it. In a qualitative content analysis, data are presented in words and themes, which makes it possible to draw some interpretation of the results. The researcher must choose whether the analysis should be of a broad surface structure (a manifest analysis) or of a deep structure (a latent analysis). In a manifest analysis, the researcher describes what the informants actually say, stays very close to the text, uses the words themselves, and describes the visible and obvious in the text. In contrast, a latent analysis is extended to an interpretive level, in which the researcher seeks to find the underlying meaning of the text: what the text is talking about (Berg, 2001; Catanzaro, 1988).          

Content analysis comprises four main stages: decontextualisation, recontextualisation, categorisation, and compilation (Figure 2). However, each stage has to be performed several times in order to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of the analysis. It is the researcher’s responsibility to maintain the quality of the process by assuring validity and reliability throughout the entire study, as the results must be as rigorous and trustworthy as possible. In a qualitative study, validity means that the results truthfully reflect the phenomena studied, and reliability requires that the same results be obtained if the study were replicated (Morse & Richards, 2002).