This qualitative research analysis method was come up by Cicely Marston, Eleanor King in their journal article -Factors that shape young people’s sexual behaviour: a systematic review (Marston and King 2006). They reviewed 268 qualitative studies of young people’s sexual behaviour published between 1990 and 2004. Additionally, they developed a method of comparative thematic analysis in which they coded each document according to themes they contained. They developed this method from existing work on meta-analysis of qualitative data (Britten et al. 2002; Greenhalgh et al. 2005) and their own experience.

I think it can be generalized as a good method for reviewing all kind literatures. To illustrate this method, take their study as an example:

First, They indentified seven themes when they were reviewing 268 studies :

Theme 1: Young people subjectively assess the risks from sexual partners on the basis of whether they are “clean” or “unclean”;

Theme 2: Sexual partners have an important influence

on behaviour in general;

Theme 3: Condoms can be stigmatising and associated with lack of trust;

Theme 4: Gender stereotypes are crucial in determining social expectations and

behaviour;

Theme 5: There are penalties and rewards for sex from wider society;

Theme 6: Reputations and social displays of sexual activity or inactivity are important;

Theme 7:Social expectations hamper communication about sex.

They did 3 steps to complete this categorizing :

Step one, generate theme independently reviewing all studies;

Step two , refine these dozens of codes through discussion and the use of constant comparison within and between codes to ensure that they accurately reflected the material.

Step three, identify correlations between the different themes, grouping them into the broad overall themes. They got the seven themes above.

Second, they coded all 268 studies with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 according to the content of each study.

Finally, studies were classed as primary—of high quality or containing empirical data about sex (ie, specific reports about sexual events rather than about attitudes or opinions), or both, or they were classed as secondary—lower quality, with no empirical data about sex.

After complete the above, you can present the results in a table as following:

Britten N, Campbell R, Pope C, Donovan J, Morgan M, Pill R (2002) Using meta ethnography to synthesise qualitative research: A worked example. Journal of Health Services Research and Policy 7:209-215

Greenhalgh T, Robert G, Macfarlane F, Bate P, Kyriakidou O, Peacock R (2005) Storylines of research in diffusion of innovation: a meta-narrative approach to systematic review. Social Science & Medicine 61:417-430

Marston C, King E (2006) Factors that shape young people’s sexual behaviour: a systematic review. The Lancet 368:1581-1586