Thread by @drvicclarke

A thread on why @ginnybraun & I have tweaked the names of the six phases of reflexive #thematicanalysis in our forthcoming book Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide. Out in October with @SAGEpsychology. In our 2006 paper Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology we called the phases:

...hold on while I look this up (seriously who remembers the details of what they wrote 15 years ago?!)... 1) familiarising yourself with the data; 2) generating initial codes; 3) searching for themes: 4) reviewing themes; 5) defining and naming themes; 6) producing the report.

In the book the 6 phases are now called: 1) familiarisation ; 2) data coding ; 3) generating initial themes; 4) reviewing & developing themes; 5) refining, defining & naming themes; 6) writing the report. Why have we made these changes? We've reflected a lot on the assumptions we

brought to writing using TA in psych - and have written about these in this paper (basically we wrongly imagined an audience for this paper who shared our assumptions about qually research & weren't careful in our choice of terminology) - tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

We've also reflected on how our assumptions and history as qualitative researchers shaped us in the interview with @drnikkihayfield below. So why the changes to the names of some phases? We realised pretty quickly that many interpreted "searching for" as
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

implying the themes are "in" the data as "themes", as real things that exist and the researcher's analytic role is to find and extract these. This was in fact a conceptualisation of themes - as "diamonds in the sand" - that we wanted to challenge in our writing around TA. Instead

we view themes as things created by the researcher, outputs of coding rather than the thing that is coded for to paraphrase Saldana. The generation of themes is a creative & interpretative process. It's not just about the data content but what the researcher brings to the process

We also realised the names of the phases could suggest you code, you "find" your themes, tweak them a bit & you're done! When it's more like the themes you initially develop are an opening gambit that may or may not go somewhere... So to acknowledge both the active role of the

researcher in generating themes & the tentative nature of the themes you initially develop we've replaced "searching for" with "generating initial themes". And to capture the role of the next 2 phases in developing & refining themes - rather than just checking fully formed themes

we've added developing to phase 4 & refining to phase 5. I honestly can't remember why we called phase 2 initial codes... (& forgot that we did for quite a while!) Can you remember @ginnybraun? For a great account of the hard work of theme development see: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Want to cite these new names for the 6 phases now? You don't have to wait until October for our book Thematic Analysis to be published! Check out our revised chapter in the brand new edition of Analysing Qual Data in Psych edited by Lyons & @AdrianCoyle5: uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/anal…

Finally apologies if anyone who saw my tweet yesterday about sharing a sneak preview of the contents of Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide thought I'd be sharing sections of the actual manuscript as preprints etc - sorry can't do that!