The Q method is a qualitative-led mixed method to measure the attitudes, motivations, perceptions, beliefs, preferences of actors. Its essence is to promote the mutual complementation and support of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Policy analysis and public administration research involves a wide range of subjective attitude analysis of research objects, but Q methods still receive limited academic attention within the field of policy analysis and public administration. Based on the scoping review, this paper retrieves and selects 48 Q method applied literatures in the field of policy analysis and public administration from the "Web of Science Core Collection (WoS)" database under the given policy and practice background, and reviews the results. The review mainly covers the reasons why authors chose to use Q method, issue selection, generation of Q sets, selection of subjects, implementation of Q ranking, quantitative analysis and factor generation, qualitative interpretation of results, etc. It is found that the Q method in the discussion of socially controversial issues, has great potential of theoretical and practical value. However, researchers' unfamiliarity with the operational steps of the methodology, the non-standard operation steps of the methodology by the researchers and the limitations of the methodology itself have brought certain constraints to the development of the Q method.