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Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns or themes within qualitative data. It involves six steps: familiarization with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes among codes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the final report. Thematic analysis is applied to various forms of qualitative data like interviews and open-ended survey responses to learn about people's views, opinions, experiences, or values on a topic.

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Naveen Pandu
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197 views5 pages

Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns or themes within qualitative data. It involves six steps: familiarization with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes among codes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the final report. Thematic analysis is applied to various forms of qualitative data like interviews and open-ended survey responses to learn about people's views, opinions, experiences, or values on a topic.

Uploaded by

Naveen Pandu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Thematic analysis

Thematic analysis is a method of analyzing qualitative data. It is usually applied to a


set of texts, such as an interview or transcripts. The researcher closely examines the
data to identify common themes – topics, ideas and patterns of meaning that come up
repeatedly.

There are various approaches to conducting thematic analysis, but the most common
form follows a six-step process: familiarization, coding, generating themes, reviewing
themes, defining and naming themes, and writing up.

When to use thematic analysis ?

Thematic analysis is a good approach to research where you’re trying to find out
something about people’s views, opinions, knowledge, experiences or values from a
set of qualitative data – for example, interview transcripts, social media profiles, or
survey responses.

Step 1: Familiarization

The first step is to get to know our data. It’s important to get a thorough overview of
all the data we collected before we start analyzing individual items.

This might involve transcribing audio, reading through the text and taking initial
notes, and generally looking through the data to get familiar with it.

Step 2: Coding

Next up, we need to code the data. Coding means highlighting sections of our text –
usually phrases or sentences – and coming up with shorthand labels or “codes” to
describe their content.

Let’s take a short example text. Say we’re researching perceptions of climate change
among conservative voters aged 50 and up, and we have collected data through a
series of interviews. An extract from one interview looks like this:
In this extract, we’ve highlighted various phrases in different colors corresponding to
different codes. Each code describes the idea or feeling expressed in that part of the
text.
At this stage, we want to be thorough: we go through the transcript of every interview
and highlight everything that jumps out as relevant or potentially interesting. As well
as highlighting all the phrases and sentences that match these codes, we can keep
adding new codes as we go through the text.

After we’ve been through the text, we collate together all the data into groups
identified by code. These codes allow us to gain a a condensed overview of the main
points and common meanings that recur throughout the data.

Step 3: Generating themes

Next, we look over the codes we’ve created, identify patterns among them, and start
coming up with themes.

Themes are generally broader than codes. Most of the time, you’ll combine several
codes into a single theme. In our example, we might start combining codes into
themes like this:
At this stage, we might decide that some of our codes are too vague or not relevant
enough (for example, because they don’t appear very often in the data), so they can be
discarded.

Other codes might become themes in their own right. In our example, we decided that
the code “uncertainty” made sense as a theme, with some other codes incorporated
into it

Again, what we decide will vary according to what we’re trying to find out. We want
to create potential themes that tell us something helpful about the data for our
purposes.

Step 4: Reviewing themes

Now we have to make sure that our themes are useful and accurate representations of
the data. Here, we return to the data set and compare our themes against it. Are we
missing anything? Are these themes really present in the data? What can we change to
make our themes work better?

If we encounter problems with our themes, we might split them up, combine them,
discard them or create new ones: whatever makes them more useful and accurate.

For example, we might decide upon looking through the data that “changing
terminology” fits better under the “uncertainty” theme than under “distrust of
experts,” since the data labelled with this code involves confusion, not necessarily
distrust.

Step 5: Defining and naming themes

Now that you have a final list of themes, it’s time to name and define each of them.

Defining themes involves formulating exactly what we mean by each theme and
figuring out how it helps us understand the data.

Naming themes involves coming up with a succinct and easily understandable name
for each theme.

For example, we might look at “distrust of experts” and determine exactly who we
mean by “experts” in this theme. We might decide that a better name for the theme is
“distrust of authority” or “conspiracy thinking”.
Step 6: Writing up

Finally, we’ll write up our analysis of the data. Like all academic texts, writing up a
thematic analysis requires an introduction to establish our research question, aims and
approach.

We should also include a methodology section, describing how we collected the data
(e.g. through semi-structured interviews or open-ended survey questions) and
explaining how we conducted the thematic analysis itself.

The results or findings section usually addresses each theme in turn. We describe how
often the themes come up and what they mean, including examples from the data as
evidence. Finally, our conclusion explains the main takeaways and shows how the
analysis has answered our research question.

In our example, we might argue that conspiracy thinking about climate change is
widespread among older conservative voters, point out the uncertainty with which
many voters view the issue, and discuss the role of misinformation in respondents’
perceptions.

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