1/ A thread providing an overview of my & @ginnybraun's latest paper on #thematicanalysis - Conceptual & Design Thinking for Thematic Analysis in the APA journal Qualitative Psychology - I will link to an open access version at the end of the thread: psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-45…
2/ Why this paper? Because TA is closer to a method (trans theoretical technique) rather than a methodology (theoretically informed & delimited framework for research) researchers need to engage in careful conceptual & design thinking to produce coherent research.
3/ What Levitt et al. (2017) call research with "methodological integrity". Some argue TA is actually a challenging option because it necessitates conceptual & design thinking - we like to see this more positively as TA making visible the thinking necessary for quality research.
4/ Thoughtless TA is perfectly possible - & indeed rather common - though so we have written this paper to help researchers design & conduct thoughtful & coherent TA research. One challenge is the diversity within TA. We love @InductiveStep & @HWWPotts' description of TA as a
5/ family of methods. This perfectly captures the plurality within TA - the different varieties have some family resemblances but there are also differences & disagreements! Understanding this plurality is crucial for methodological integrity & using your chosen version knowingly
6/ Different varieties involve very different conceptualisations of key constructs like themes & codes/coding & procedures enact often implicit research values. We help researchers navigate their way through the TA landscape by mapping 3 main types of TA that captures much of the
7/ diversity within the TA family - coding reliability, codebook & reflexive. Our goal isn't to persuade the reader to use reflexive TA (well maybe a tiny bit 😉) but to select an approach consistent with their research values & to use it knowingly/deliberately. As our main focus
8/ is what we now call reflexive TA - to demarcate it from other approaches - we outline 10 core assumptions of reflexive TA & we explain why themes in reflexive TA are NOT topic summaries. One of our students memorably described topic summaries as bucket themes! The researcher
9/ slaps a label on a bucket (experiences of... barriers to...) & chucks ay data relevant to that topic label in the bucket. What connects the data is the topic. Topic summary themes are often very close to data collection questions. Themes in reflexive TA are more like stories.
10/ They tell a story about a pattern in the data & explain why it matters. All the different facets of the theme/story relate to an underlying or overarching concept or idea. You can't know what your themes are before you have coded & analysed your data. This means concepts like
11/ saturation simply don't work in reflexive TA. In the second half of this beast of a paper me move to design thinking & consider what makes for coherent reflexive TA research design. We consider various routes into design, appropriate research questions for reflexive TA & note
12/ the fluidity of research questions in reflexive TA - research questions can evolve as the research progresses. The initial question can be broad & open & it can become more focused as data analysis progresses or even shift to something quite different. This is ok! We consider
13/ suitable data collection methods - so far we haven't met a method reflexive TA doesn't like! Even visual methods. Check out Kate Gleeson's guidelines for using a reflexive TA approach to analyse visual data in @reavey_paula's fab book: routledge.com/A-Handbook-of-…
14/ We tackle the size & constitution of datasets ('samples" in old money) & explain why saturation and statistical models don't work for reflexive TA. You might also want to check out on paper specifically focused on the problematics of saturation: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
15/ Finally we discuss quality standards & provide best practice standards for reporting reflexive TA - we explain why we prefer the headings methodology (over method) - to signal theoretically embedded practice - & analysis (over findings/results) - to get away from the idea
16/ that researchers "discover" the analysis. Phew! It's a long paper & covers a lot of ground. We hope you find it useful! For an open access version of the paper - check out: uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7164974…
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