Deductive Content Analysis

This chapter describes deductive content analysis and how it can be applied to the field of nursing science. Deductive content analysis is not commonly used, but is nevertheless beneficial for testing concepts, categories, theories or any conceptual structure in a new context. Deductive content analysis is similar to inductive content analysis in that it is applied in qualitative research and the data collection method aims to reach data saturation. The main difference between the two analytical techniques is that research in which deductive content analysis is applied usually has prior theoretical knowledge as the starting point. As such, the research questions are influenced by prior knowledge, and hence, affect the data collection stage. Another difference between inductive and deductive content analysis is that deductive content analysis is guided by a half-structured or structured analysis matrix. As in inductive content analysis, the reporting of results should be structured according to the identified concepts, categories and/or themes.