Background:

in health sciences, nursing is the discipline that is involved in the development of qualitative studies, possibly linked to the fact of experiencing personalized human suffering on a daily basis. This is a consequence of the holistic concept of care on which this profession is based.

Objective:

to analyze the current perspective of the qualitative research nursing science in Latin America in the last five years.

Methods:

a systematic bibliographic review was carried out to develop a critical reflexive analysis of documents during the months of September-October 2019. The bibliographic databases used were: PubMed, CUMED, CINAHL, CUIDEN PLUS, Lilacs and Google Scholar Metasearch Engine. The search terms included the keywords in English and Portuguese, for their definition the Thesaurus of Descriptors in Health Sciences (DeCS) was used. The Boolean operator used was AND. The principles of content analysis were followed, including the identification of meanings that were pointed out more repetitively, the consistency, explanations and relationships of these, through all the studies included in this review.

Results:

qualitative research was approached from Florence Nigthingale to the present, including the study of all aspects, components and phenomena related to health of interest to nurses.

Conclusions:

qualitative studies are of special relevance for the development of nursing science, it facilitates a better understanding of the world, with a practical effect, since it will be based on knowledge of the reality interpreted by people.

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