thematic analysis | how to present the results

so in this video i will explain briefly some basic rules for presenting the results of thematic analysis how to present the results of thematic analysis uh i will discuss several aspects of that presentation so i will start with the overall structure of a chapter the results chapter if you have conducted thematic analysis in your study then i will move on to the structure of individual sections so sections in which you will be discussing individual themes in your study and then i will also talk about some general rules uh regarding the the overall layout so how do we even present themes do we use tables do we use models what else do we use and then i'll show you examples from a published study a big study funded by the british council i was one of the authors and i was responsible specifically for the qualitative results and these were the results of thematic analysis so i'll show you real examples so that you can understand how different techniques and different approaches to how to present the results of your thematic analysis so let's start with the structure of the chapter so you have conducted thematic analysis in your study and you need to structure your results chapter somehow so the most important rule it may sound obvious but it's really not that obvious the most important rule is simply that you should present your uh your thematic framework to the reader in a few minutes i'll tell you how to do it in terms of layout so do use tables or models or other visual tools so you pre you're presenting you want to present your thematic framework to the reader and then you want to move from one main theme to the other so that's how ideally your your results chapter should be structured so these main themes are usually individual sections which i'll explain in a second as well and within each main theme usually you have some sub themes but the the overall structure again is you simply want to present the main themes and take turns describing and discussing each of the main themes in your study when it comes to the order in which you want to present these themes this will be up to you so uh what i usually do i when i sit down before writing the chapter or or the results section or whatever i'm working on in terms of presenting my thematic analysis results i sit down and in my head i try to think of of a coherent narrative so like a story of my data sometimes i i literally imagine myself explaining this this data to somebody uh or you may actually explain try to explain your data to somebody to your family member uh the reason it helps is that uh the only rule there is no real rule that says you cannot do this or you should you have to do this the only rule is that it should be coherent it should be understandable there should be a nice flow to your chapter for this reason like i said i sit down and i think about uh how i want to present it so uh so so you don't have to present your themes for example depending on how strong they were or how many times they were discussed by person by your participants like bart by [Music] but rather by how they contribute to your story how do you want to start your story what what would it make sense uh what would make sense to start your story with so think about it this way if you were talking about if you're presenting at the conference or talking to your friend or mother or or wife or husband uh about your data and what you found where would you start would you start with by talking about general patterns and comparing your participants would you start with something else so that's uh it should be almost common sense what would make sense you know in your opinion so sometimes so i rehearse that in my head as i said and sometimes i want for example initially to start with a given theme but then i think okay actually if i want to discuss this theme i would have to make too many references to this other theme but the reader is not familiar with the other theme yet so okay so maybe actually i will start with the other theme because then it will make more sense once i move to this theme because then i will be referring back to what the reader already knows about the other theme so like i said common sense is more important here than anything else and and it is your decision uh regarding the order so how do you want to present these themes so like i said generally your chapter will consist of individual sections and individual sections will discuss your main themes so so the second point and in this video our individual sections so within each individual section you want to present a given theme so one of your main themes uh ideally you want to start with a brief summary or a brief explanation of what this theme was so explain it to the reader and then move on to evidence so give evidence of the presence of these themes in your in your data by evidence of course i mean some some extracts extracts quotes this is really what makes uh qualitative research in my opinion uh so interesting so interesting to work on but also so interesting to read to the reader so it should be again i guess it should be a story so you're presenting so you're introducing the topic you're introducing this theme and then you're moving through uh from one participant to the other and you know contributing and adding a little bit more to that theme by by extracts then you discuss the extract so you don't really just want to throw these extracts many many extracts there and leave them with no comment but rather you want to provide extracts as evidence of what you just said and then ideally after the extract again you want to at least refer to it or interpret it a little bit more here one very important thing that i want to mention this is one of the the key points in this video and one of the key errors i think key mistakes that that people tend to make as i said you want to go theme by theme uh generally in your chapter and then in your section you want to focus on one theme and you want to go through different participants you don't have to go through each participant so that's that's important as well you don't have to cite every single participant again you are in charge of of you know of that decision how many extracts you want to provide and how many participants but a very important point is that you are focusing on this one theme so uh you're not focusing on on exhausting the data from one participant and then moving on to the other some people do it and in some approaches it's more acceptable it's more common so perhaps an ethnography for example were or detailed case studies where you just want to describe your case your participant and this participant is the basis of the structure of your chapter because you could do that as well so you could divide the chapter into participants but that's only in some like i said some specific approaches usually you want to follow the structure that i mentioned you want to move from one theme to the other and this means that within these sections you want to when you talk about participants you only want to give relevant extracts that refer to the theme you are discussing in this one section and then in the next section the following section when you talk about another theme you can come back to this participant and again give an extract from his or her interview so that's that's probably uh the most important thing to remember when presenting the results of thematic frame thematic analysis so now finally before i show you the actual the actual section and the published paper that i mentioned i want to talk about the layout of how to present themes do we use do we use tables do we use graphs what what do we use it won't probably won't help you that much to know that there is no rule that says you should or you have to use this kind of a presentation there is no such rule so again this will depend on you and your preferences i would say that it's quite common and i'm personally a big fan and a big proponent of and supporter of the idea of using tables so tables are probably one of the most common tools or ways to present your thematic framework simple tables so tables where you present your theme and perhaps depending on on what you focus on in your study either the coding frequency so how many times it appeared or how frequent it was how strong it was in your data some people like to give a definition or of a theme in that table as well in one of the columns some people like to provide an example extract so this will depend on you but i think tables are probably the most effective way to to present your thematic framework especially in the beginning so when you introduce and when you start the chapter uh when you introduce the thematic framework before you move on to the discussion that i mentioned of individual themes it's probably good to show a nice table that summarizes the whole thematic framework so then it will obviously make it easier for the reader to navigate through your themes as you discuss them in individual sections but then of course uh feel free to in addition to your table or sometimes instead of your table to use other forms of presentation or visual presentation it could be a diagram even a simple diagram it could be some kind of a model so so really it's up to you again how you decide to present these themes sometimes it makes more sense to use some kind of a model especially if you're talking about some kind of relationships if you've developed a model an explanation or a theory of how something works of course the table is not that effective i would still argue that it's good to start with a table even in that case but i would probably add this model right after the table and explain that the themes from the table are explained the relationship between them is explained in this model so this will really depend on you and your study as well also apart from certain differences and characteristics of your study what will determine whether you use any visual representations like a graph or a model is of course individual preferences and not just your preferences but also your reader's preferences so there are people who are more visual and they prefer visual representation so i think for this reason it's always worth adding some kind of a visual some people simply prefer this kind of presenting the data i'm not good with models or graphs and i really struggle to even think of a clear and nice model but one of my phd supervisors when i was a student i remember she always insisted on me using models because she preferred this kind of presentation and this showed me that there are really different types of people in this world so it's always good to think about your audience and a variety of different preferences and finally sometimes it's even acceptable not to use any models and not to use any tables again it depends perhaps your thematic framework is extremely straightforward and short perhaps uh some parts of your data do not need a model or visual representation because you may be just summarizing you know some some main key points about let's say demographics or some kind of characteristics of your participants and you may feel like uh it doesn't make sense to put them on you know any other any kind of a model so models again they are good for example for relationships sometimes for some attitudes and beliefs but they are not so good for demographic characteristics it doesn't make much sense i can't imagine where you would possibly put these characteristics on a model unless these characteristics are believed to have an influence on something where of course it would make sense to you know link them with an arrow or something uh to another theme but otherwise it may be a bit weird to uh to include this kind of information on a model so sometimes the point is sometimes you don't even need any kind of a visual representation so it's very flexible but to summarize i believe that perhaps using a table i would strongly suggest that you use a table and some kind of a simple graph or model if it makes sense considering your themes and the themes that emerged from your study so now let's quickly have a look at the study that i mentioned so again this was a big a large study it was about a certain educational approach which is called english medium instruction it was funded by the british council and i was one of the authors i was responsible for qualitative data analysis and for writing the qualitative results section so let's have a look okay so this is a study that i told you about as i said it was a study of a certain instructional approach which is emi english and english medium instruction it's a good study it's a good example simply because there is a variety of ways in which we presented the findings and also there is a variety of data it was a mixed method study there is questionnaire data there are open-ended question results were which were also analyzed thematically their focus groups are interviews so let's go to uh to my interview results section the first thing that you can see here actually are the questionnaire responses so these here are the questionnaire open-ended responses these were not the quantitative this is not quantitative data it was uh presented before this uh this is kind of a qualitative data because these are open-ended responses as i said i analyze them thematically as well so you can see that here for example this is what we chose as as a way as an approach to presenting these results but then so basically this study was about approaches to emi so english medium instruction how its approach in different universities about beliefs about the driving forces of this approach so why you know why uh why introduce this approach why universities decide to introduce these this approach and also about attitudes so general attitudes how do students and teachers feel about this instructional approach so here we are moving on to the interview results as you can see in terms of approaches to emi so how it was approached so there are different ways how individual institutions approached this instruction you can see that here for example i did not choose to to present the results either as a table or a model so this is a kind of something i i covered earlier in the video so sometimes it doesn't make sense to put things like this on the model uh there is no you know there are no relationships that we're interested in so no arrows you know and anything like that would make sense so it kind of makes sense just to discuss these approaches here it's a relatively straightforward topic so this is what we did and of course as i said before uh i'm supporting my my my arguments my points the points i'm making with quotes from the text then i move on to the driving forces which is the second main theme because it was one of the questions the research questions uh it was about driving forces of emi and again because it wasn't there wasn't that much data and the responses were quite similar so so again i felt like it doesn't really make that much sense to to try to present them in in some other way so basically these two first sections are almost like an introduction to the actual uh the actual content of this of these results so then i move on to the attitudes towards mi this was a much more complex theme so you can see that here for example i broke it down into advantages of emi and challenges of emi so this is important advantages and challenges these were within the attitudes so basically these were representative of the attitudes towards emi so here within the challenges within the advantages as you can see there is a model there is a model that presents disadvantages because the participants believed in advantages that could be further classified into personal benefits and external benefits it kind of makes sense to present it in a nice and and clear way like like we did here and then i move on to challenges and these challenges as you can see there are two ways to in which we present these challenges so we present these challenges as a table first and we present these challenges as a as a model again as a model again it makes sense because you can see there are different types of challenges and the main reason why it's presented as a table as well is because here it was a large theme what do what i did here before as you can see i showed the percentage of uh of interview data that was related to advantages and and related to challenges to demonstrate that the participants talked more about challenges than they did about advantages and this is evident here as well it's more complex and here we felt it's important to show differences between the different groups so what did students say what what did these teachers say and what did these teachers say so they are different kinds of teachers content staff are just people who the teachers who present a normal content in a university and eap staff are the ones that were concerned with the english language support so so anyway because here it was so important to see these differences of course it makes sense to have a table so as i said in the video it really depends on your study what you want to show and why you believe it's useful to use a given a given way of presenting the data so before that i didn't use anything at first then i used a model and then i use a model and a table and then after this as you can see i move on to specific challenges that i that i mentioned uh that i mentioned before so language related and then institutional so the challenges from this model and from this table and then i so so here we have sections about these challenges again i don't i don't have any more i don't present them anymore and in any kind of a in any form of a model it's just text it's just text and as i said uh you start with defining a given theme you start with saying what these were and then you just give extras give evidence from your data so basically that's the most that's the the easiest way to remember the structure and something i i said earlier in this video you present a theme and then you give evidence and this is what's happening for the remaining the remaining themes from this interview so as you can see and as i said before you can really decide how you want to present the results of your thematic analysis sometimes you may decide to uh to include a table sometimes you may decide to include some kind of a model or visual representations representation and sometimes you may decide not to use anything at all so i hope that you learned something new from this video if you did please like the video it really helps me and helps the video get found on youtube if you're new to this channel consider subscribing and if you have anything else to add or if you have any questions feel free to post these questions in the comments

Channel: Research with Dr Kriukow

Views: 201,909

Keywords: thematic analysis in qualitative research, qualitative data analysis, qualitative findings, presenting qualitative data results, presenting qualitative research findings, presenting qualitative data, how to present qualitative data, how to present qualitative research findings in powerpoint, how to discuss qualitative research findings, findings chapter qualitative research, findings chapter qualitative research example, presenting thematic analysis, thematic analysis results

Id: FV5OhmEZjyg

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020