**6. Method**

### **6.1 Study design**

The chapter employed a qualitative document analysis (QDA) approach to the strategic plans and annual reports of four universities in South Africa. The advantages of QDA are time-serving, reliable data, yielding multidimensional data and

easy access to the public domain such as websites or libraries in a short space of time without seeking permission [51, 52]. According to Scott, 1999 in Karppinen and Moe [51], documents are primary sources of activities and interest of the owner; in this case, universities, so in analysing them, researchers move from 'sources to facts'. The interpreted data present facts on the actual alignment of the university's vision, mission and strategic goals as depicted in the annual report. The strategic plan provided the context from which the annual report was derived [52]. In this chapter, an analysis of the strategic plans and the annual reports give various dimensions of the community engagement activities in various disciplines and other university activities.

Like any kind of research, the content analysis should adhere to particular qualities to enhance rigour. In the case of journal articles, aspects such as peer reviews, citations and methods among others are preferred guiding principles [53]. This study employed desktop document analysis of strategic plans and annual reports of the four universities in South Africa. Document analysis is known for weaknesses such as missing information, among others [53]. The researchers compared annual reports for consistency of table contents with those of the previous years to identify wide deviations. The reporting framework prescribed by the DHET in South Africa was also used to check for annual report content alignment with the framework. Construct validity was ensured by comparing the reports with those submitted by the universities to the DHET and Department of statistics. All reports agreed with the reporting framework**.** The annual reports and strategic plans were considered authentic, reliable and valid because they were official documents of the universities and signed by the university chancellor and also contain statements by independent auditors [51, 53]. More so, the annual reports are a by-product of various academic activities in which universities account for spending on their clientele and DHET as a funding body [37, 52]. The documents contained the comprehensive university strategy for teaching and learning, research, community engagement and administrative and financial plans. The researchers scanned through the documents to locate community engagement-related plans and reports. Due to different conceptualisations of community engagement across universities, specific concepts per university were searched. For example, community engagement at the University of Cape Town is called social responsive, at WITS it is referred to as social impact, at UNIZULU it is community engagement, and at Fort Hare, it is community engagement [25, 26].

The quality in QDA is also established by document content quality and not by the number of documents assessed [52]. In the chapter, oldest universities such as the University of Limpopo were excluded by the available strategic plan was less informative [53], and only the 2017 annual report was accessible on the website. This is the step taken when triaging the documents for relevance [52].
