Conducting qualitative content analysis in urban planning research and urban studies

Qualitative content analysis as a kind of systematic analysis of qualitative data in which the latent values and meanings of the text are tried to be identified, described, and interpreted, is one of the most widely used qualitative methods in urban planning research and urban studies. However, the excessive flexibility and development of the method in other theoretical fields have obscured how to use it in the field of planning and urban studies. In this paper, we have tried to propose a procedural model that is suitable for the specific con-ditions and issues of the field by analyzing the content of the documents obtained from the systematic review of the theoretical literature of planning and urban studies that have used this method. This procedural model ex-plains the process of qualitative content analysis within five stages: choosing the type and theoretical context of data, explaining the objectives, deciding on how to analyze the data, deciding on how to interpret the data, and application of the interpretation results. Proposing the procedural model of qualitative content analysis that comes from the field of planning and urban studies can help, in addition to disambiguating the function of the method, make the method more visible and more correctly used in the field.