Qualitative Content Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports with Emphasis on Social Stakeholders

Having a mutual relationship and considering the stakeholder’s interests, require recognizing, measuring, and reporting of the entity’s social responsibility performance. Companies in the capital market of Iran have understood the importance of this issue in the last decade and they report some topics in their reports in a scattered manner without a structured framework based on the information needs of stakeholders about social responsibility performance. In this paper, the most important themes about different social stakeholders in social responsibility reports of Tehran Stock Exchange using qualitative content analysis were extracted. 1490 pages of reports, related to documents of 58 companies as sample research, in periods between 2013 to 2018 in a single file for per company after removing duplicate and irrelevant disclosures, were analyzed with content analysis method using MAXQDA 2018 software. Finally, 1967 codes included 18 categories and 62 subcategories were extracted about social stakeholders included employees, society, customers, and product/ service based on most codes respectively. Examining the difference between the codes of two groups included big and small companies, which were grouped by three indicators showed that, the type of disclosure differs significantly between the groups. This difference was also significant in the different industries. Furthermore, it was determined between the documents of two groups by similarity analysis that reporting structure of big companies with an emphasis on themes about social stakeholders is very similar. Similarity analysis in sample industries showed that cement and automobile industry are most similar to each other compared to other industries.