Untangling the Misleading Message Around Saturation in Qualitative Nursing Studies

How often have you read a nursing qualitative study in which an author decides to recruit a specific number of study participants and then by some miracle, when that number has been reached, claims that “saturation has been achieved”? Puzzling claims about saturation have permeated our methodological literature for as long as our discipline has been using qualitative approaches and have become ubiquitous in published study reports. Have you ever wondered what authors really mean by this, on what basis they make such claims, and whether they are actually believable?