What is thematic analysis?

so I'm Victoria Clarke I am one half of brown and Clark and it's pronounced brown not brawn so you're in the know there and it's Clark with an E not Clark without an E and it's Victoria not Vicki so you know everything you need to know about our names I'm a lecturer here at Uwe I'm in the Department of Health and Social Sciences I'm a psychologist and my area of special ISM is gender and sexuality but I also write a lot about qualitative methods and particularly about somatic analysis so with my colleague have a picture of her here Ginny Brown from the University of Auckland we've written a lot about qualitative methods if you haven't come across it we've written a textbook called successful qualitative research and we've just getting a plug while I'm here our latest book an edited book with them Deborah gray is called collecting qualitative data so this is an introduction to different kinds of ways of collecting qualitative data beyond the face-to-face interview for qualitative research and it's very sort of practical and hands-on and we've also written about somatic analysis we wrote originally a paper in 2006 Google Scholar just released a report that told us or someone pointed out to us that it is the most cited paper in academia published in 2006 so it's had a huge impact on the landscape of qualitative research and it's meant that somatic analysis has become a very popular it's always been popular but it's become even more popular as a technique for doing qualitative analysis if you're hoping today is going to be a step-by-step guide to how you do it I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed because that's not the focus of my talk today I'm very happy to do a talk with that focus and I could do that perhaps May or June next year if we did it in June Jenny would be here so you could have both brown and Clark but what I want to do today is to share some of how our thinking has developed over the decade or so since we wrote the original paper and talk around somatic analysis and particularly to highlight some of the issues that we see in published work some of the confusions some of the misunderstandings and to try and bring some clarification so the focus for my talk will be these three questions what is it when is it useful and what does best practice look like and best practice will be a focus for the whole talk but I'll do some summing up towards the end so if you were really hoping for a step-by-step guide in your horribly disappointed feel free to runaway net hell you don't have to sit through me talking about somatic analysis so what is it the reason why anyone knew what that is mappa Mundi yep many very famous medieval map I saw it recently in Hereford Cathedral with my aunt and the reason why I put it here is because I just wanted to emphasize the fact that when we define something when we map a terrain that that mapping says as much about us and our perspective as it does about the terrain we're mapping and the mappa Mundi captures that really well because it's not as recognizable as a map to us as contemporary kind of Ordnance Survey maps so in telling you what I think ta is in defining and mapping the terrain of TA I'm inevitably speaking from a particular perspective so please don't treat this as an objective account of what TA is it's my version of what TA is that other TA proponents might not recognize they might not recognize the terms in which we describe their approaches and they may fool even quite fronted by how we describe their approaches so just hold that in mind the other thing I want to say in trying to define we're not trying to suppress diversity but we're very mindful that there's lots of confusion around ta so we're trying to hopefully clarify demystify and contribute to a discussion that leads to better practice and more informed practice rather than saying you must do it our way and if you don't do it our way we get very annoyed some of our friends kind of jokingly describe us as the TA police Oh one friend described you as the Queen's of TA but we don't see that as our role as kind of telling people exactly how to do things and what we want to do is encourage a conversation around good practice so the origins of TA is where I want to start when Jenny and I first started writing around ta we read an account by Helen Goff I don't if I'm pronouncing that correctly where she claimed that the philosopher of science Gerald Houghton invented the term somatic analysis in his work on the motto in scientific thought in the 1970s and we thought oh great and we put that in a few chapters as the origins in the history and when we started doing background work for our book and we digged a bit deeper we discovered no that is not correct the term has been around for a lot longer obviously doing historical work online is quite hard because digitization is something that's happened only relatively recently but we found examples of musicologists in the 1930s saying they're doing somatic analysis when they're analyzing musical scores sociologists in the 40s saying they're doing thematic analysis when they're analyzing mass propaganda and psychotherapists in the 30s the 40s and the 50s saying they're doing thematic analysis when they're analyzing the results of projective tests so as far as we can tell the term has been around for a long time and it's been used in lots of different contexts but it seems to be about finding patterns of meaning in things whether that's the kind of data that's recognizable to social and how scientists or whether it's looking at musical scores and so on our best guess and are seeing this quite tentatively is that we think somatic analysis evolved from quantitative content analysis the term seemed to be used interchangeably fairly early on quantitative content analytic work from quite early on talked about finding themes and so on in data so that's our best kind of guess of how the approach evolved and it seemed to evolve in parallel with qualitative content analysis and in many ways qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis are two terms for the same analytic approach I won't sort of geek out into detail about how qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis are different or similar but if you want to ask questions about that I'm very happy to talk more about that so however tá developed it certainly has a shared history with qualitative content analysis people start to develop procedures for ta around the 80s 1990s when there's a general explosion of interest in qualitative analysis more broadly we've read some claims that ta developed from grounded theory in fact it probably seems to be the other way around so just a gentle invitation to be slightly skeptical about definitive claims about how da ta developed as an approach at the same time as people using or developing approaches to thematic analysis we see lots of examples in the 80s in the 90s of people talking about themes emerging in without any reference to a set of procedures or a method that was employed so this is why Jeannie and I when we published our paper in 2006 outlining our approach to ta describe ta is a poorly demarcated rarely acknowledged yet widely used qualitative analytic method so lots of people saying themes emerge without detailing how those themes emerged things have shifted and there is now we think a general acceptance that ta is a distinct approach there's still some debate around this so that we try and think of some examples so there's some debate about it in Carla willings most recent textbook 2013 her book she has a discussion about it other people have some debate about is it a distinct approach is it a set of generic techniques in terms of what people are doing with it it seems to be a distinct approach in terms of what we had in mind is that it's a distinct approach rather than a generic set of techniques but it can be the skills you develop in doing ta can be deployed in other methods but there are some important differences between TA and other methods that mean sometimes people describe rounded theory as ta within a theoretical framework but actually think grounded Theory offers something quite different and again that's something I'm happy to talk more about in the question and answer period so we're at a point now when ta is very popular widely used but there's still lots of confusion around it and I think the biggest confusion which explains why there's an umbrella on the screen is that it's often understood to be one approach when in actual fact we think it's best thought of as an umbrella term for a wide range of approaches and that those approaches differ both in terms of procedure and underlying philosophy so what I'm gonna try to do today is to give you a sense of the way Ginny and I have organized all the different approaches to TA we've come across I think we got two about thirty different approaches and stopped counting and we have identified what we call three main schools of TA because there's no one approach associated with them but their various different approaches that share characteristics in common that share an underlying philosophy and share the same broad approach to procedure and these three schools are what we call coding reliability somatic analysis codebook somatic analysis and reflexive thematic analysis and that's where we'd locate our approach in that final category of reflexive somatic analysis I will talk about these a bit more in a moment but firstly I want to tackle that really fundamental issue of what is a theme if we're going to define somatic analysis we have to define what a theme is when we first wrote our paper we thought everyone knew what a theme was we were wrong everyone doesn't know what a theme is and there's different conceptualizations out there and I want to capture the two main conceptualizations I'm afraid I haven't got lots of useful things on my slides I've got just lots of images for you and so two main definitions of a theme and we're not saying that people own these definitions but looking at how people are seen to be conceptualizing and understanding this seems to be the idea of a theme that there underpins their work say we've got a bucket and a storybook and I have to thank my students for coming up with these terms they're not my kind of inventions they're what have come up in teaching and students kind of saying oh so it's like a bucket yes thank you I will be using that in all future publications so a bucket theme is a slightly paife playful term for what sometimes referred to in the literature as a domain summary so this is where a researcher identifies an area or domain of the data often reflective of a data collection question and then they summarize everything the participant said or the main things they said in relation to that area often it there's sort of surface level of meaning and this gets reported as a theme I will go on and explain this in a bit more detail in a moment so that's a bucket theme or a domain summary I'll kind of unpack that and explore that more in a moment and then we have the storybook theme and we were trying to think of a sort of an idea or a metaphor that captured as nicely as the bucket the sort of second conceptualization of a scene within TA and we think a storybook works because what this captures is themes are something more interpretive creative that they're telling a story about the data that reflects the researchers interpretive lens and there's a core idea a core concept a central message that unifies the theme and again I'll kind of explore that in a bit more detail okay so let's think about buckets a bit more we have agonized a bit about do we use published examples to kind of illustrate the kind of things that we're talking about because we don't want to feel like we're naming and shaming people we don't want to feel like we're telling people off but having agonized it quite a bit we decided that concrete examples are really useful for illustrating what we're talking about so domain summaries or bucket themes here's an example from research on adolescent perceptions of the risk and benefits of conventional cigarettes e-cigarettes and marijuana this paper reports five themes and the first theme title is perceived risk and benefits and conventional cigarettes compared to marijuana straight away when reading this paper I got the sense of oh I think we've got a demain summary here rather than a storybook theme because we've got risks and we've got benefits there's no sense of unified or shared meaning going on there's no sense of the kind of story on the essence here and then when we looked at the paper in more depth we could see that's exactly what's going on what the theme does is tell the reader everything the participants said all the main things they said or the trends in what they said in relation to perceive risk and benefits so there's no concept there there's no central idea that ties all nations together it's just a summary or an overview of what participants said so the author's make so overview type statement so they say youth either stated there was nothing good about using conventional cigarettes or stated that using cigarettes could help someone relax so there's lots of these kind of overview statements but there's no sensual kind of story there there's no essence there's nothing that unifies these observations it's just a series of observations about what participants said in relation to this particular issue sometimes this is an issue of how themes are named so people are actually conceptualizing themes in the storybook way but they've named them in a way that makes them sound like bucket themes so it's about getting your themes well named and there was a big debate on Twitter about that recently about is it important to name your themes well and we think it is because they're a bit like the hello welcome to my theme this is what my seems going to be about they're a bit like an abstract or an invitation or a welcome to the theme that gives you a sense of what it's going to be about so we do see that it's quite important and we definitely say avoid one-word theme names unless you're doing something very poetic and kind of creative so there is a debate about whether this is a meaningful conceptualization of a theme or whether this represents an underdeveloped scene when the researchers haven't done enough analytic work they've just skimmed over the surface of the data and they haven't gone deeper to think about underlying patterns underlying concepts underlying ideas so for many ta proponents this is a valid conceptualization of a theme for Jenny and I and in terms of our approach we see this as an underdeveloped scene as something that hasn't been fully realized and fully developed and we often get the sense when reading publish work that that's what's happened that the theme hasn't and all the themes haven't been fully developed it's not that these are the right themes for the aims of the research it's that the researchers could have gone deeper could have developed their understanding and their insight if the analytic engagement had a bit more depth so to give you another example from a study looking at Muslim views on mental health and psychotherapy it's a paper that reported seven themes that's a fairly hefty number of themes for one relatively short paper and these were causes problem management relevance of services barriers service delivery therapy content than therapy characteristics again you can tell from those theme names that you're getting this kind of domain summary bucket theme everything the participant said about therapy therapy characteristics rather than some kind of unifying pattern or idea I actually use this paper in teaching used it last year and we were having a discussion about it and what the students kind of pointed out is when you get to the discussion set the authors make some really interesting observations about their data so one of the things that they talked about was the fact that cutting across all these different themes was an inter weaving of religious and secular influences in participants sense-making and we thought well that seems that's where they are that's where the story is and if more analytic work had been done that this would have been a far more insightful interpretive interrogative analysis that would have gone beyond kind of skimming the surface and simply summarizing so it is worth holding in mind how you're conceptualizing themes and what you're trying to achieve with your themes sometimes my applied colleagues tell me well Victoria it's different in Applied Research you're in an airy-fairy academic and in Applied Research we've got to be really concrete and this is how we should be doing our themes so I was very pleased when I came across a few papers published in Nursing that actually make a very similar argument that these kind of themes aren't fully worked up themes that applied researchers need to be doing more analytic work need to be raising their analysis from domain summaries to fully realize themes because this is really important for achieving actionable outcomes from applied research the fact that participants some of them said this and some of them said that you can't do much with but getting to those underlying patterns concepts ideas that can be really useful that can be something that can inform actionable outcomes and I'll point you to those three papers later on because I think there are really useful read particularly if you're working in applied domains okay so I've said fully realized themes and then I realized I wanted to change it but it's a bit late now so let's call them storybook themes and here the theme is shared a patterning of shared meaning underpinned by central concept or a central idea so when we sort of reflected on the fact all people saying don't seem to be understanding what we meant by a theme and lots of people are doing domain summaries and saying that you you know using Brown and Clark and reporting domain summaries and that's not really what we had in mind we decided to introduce the idea of a central organizing concept and there's quite a rude abbreviation of that that's very memorable it helps you to think about the fact what's the essence of this team what's the central idea here what does this theme capture what's the patterning of shared meaning here what ties all my analytic observations what's the story I'm telling so in this conceptualization of a theme themes are seen as things that are quite abstract that they're often about capturing implicit meaning beneath the surface so if we think back to that mental health example we have these quite concrete themes but what's underpinning them is this interweaving of kind of secular and religious ideas so it's taking that underpinning meaning up analytically and making that the basis of the themes it's about uniting data that at first sight might seem quite disparate drawing together data from multiple contexts that seems ideally explained large portions of the data that they're not just summarizing what participants said in relation to a particular data collection question they're kind of bigger and broader and that they're built from smaller meaning units they're built from codes and this is something that's really important that are come back to you in a moment that themes aren't a starting point for analysis there an end point that there where you end up rather than where you start so to give a concrete example I've got an example from Ginny and our colleague Gareth Terry's research looking at the meanings of male body hair it's quite a simple example don't be offended by that Ginny Harris that's what I'm trying to get at is its story vaccines are not rocket science they don't have to be incredibly kind of complex but they're just doing something slightly differently so it's a qualitative paper on the meanings of male body hair a great read a really really good example of a good somatic analysis and they report three themes so if you think about a paper reporting seven themes and one reporting three themes you get a real sense that there's a more in-depth detailed and complex discussion of these themes the first theme is men's hair as natural my simple idea and what the theme captured was the way in which body hair was often described as natural for men and a dominant expression of masculine embodiment so they are exploring and capturing and reporting on more surface meaning so participants making statements about the naturalness of male body hair but the theme also goes deeper and looks at some of the underlying assumptions that enable the surface meaning to make sense so they looked at the ideas that men should be hairy and women hairless that men's embodiment is biologically located and natural that woman's embodiment is socially located and worked upon and produced and they looked at how these gendered assumptions were naturalized and centralized in participants sense-making so hopefully you get a sense from that so it's something more interpretive it's something interrogating more it does involve reporting and making sense of more concrete meaning but it's also thinking about the underlying assumptions as well so that's a storybook theme but it's also what we would consider in our approach to TA um fully-realized theme so the other point I wanted to make about themes my input and output machine I had lots of fun and it's different approaches to TA very on weather themes are conceptualized as inputs into the analytic process so the thing you start with or whether they're outputs the thing you work towards the thing you get with that you end up with so for some versions of TA you start with your themes there your analytic inputs you develop them right at the start perhaps after some data familiarize ation or before engaging with data at all and that they guide the subsequent coding process they all say the thing that you report they organize the reporting but you develop them right at the start often reflective of data collection questions for example so in some instances the questions that people use in their interview schedule become their themes and what they report are summaries of each of those responses to each of those questions so you can see how when themes are conceptualized as inputs they're often domain summaries because these are things that you can very easily identify at the start when themes are seen as outputs they come after coding and they're built from codes so with inputs we move from seeing to code to see and without puts we move from code to theme and so when people conceptualize themes as analytic outputs they tend to be the more storybook conceptualization of a theme because it'd be quite hard to necessarily identify that at the start of the process because it involves some kind of thinking engagement interpretive work and it would be you wouldn't necessarily spot that right at the start without really engaging with the data so those are two important distinctions Buckett theme story book theme input or output so that's look at the three main kinds of TA so we have coding reliability reflexive or organic we used to call it organic we're now sort of thinking oh maybe reflexive is a good work and codebook and I can now answer the question that the first time we did a TA workshop someone said what's the difference between TA and framework analysis and I have no idea now happily I can answer that question would it be helpful to talk through smoky big cue is that language everyone's familiar with or will it be useful to talk through that okay I can see some nodding so this is a distinction made by Killoren fine and their distinguishing between different conceptualizations of qualitative research so small cue qualitative research is the use of qualitative tools and techniques but within a broadly positivist Sensibility so it's small or partial equally in the core components of research technique and philosophy are only partially qualitative the techniques are qualitative but the philosophy isn't big cue qualitative is when both those elements the techniques and the philosophy are qualitative so if we think about the characteristics of qualitative a qualitative paradigm or a paradigm paradigms plural there's a big debate about is qualitative research paradigms at multiple paradigms won't get bogged down into that now but if we think about qualitative paradigm then some of the characteristics might be contextual meanings and meaning being situated in contextual the acknowledgement of multiple realities and emphasis on research of subjectivity as a resource and then forces on researcher reflexivity and so on so big cue qualitative is about that kind of philosophy and using qualitative techniques in relation to within that kind of philosophy and we find this distinction a really useful way for thinking about different approaches to somatic analysis and mapping out what's different between different approaches so coding reliability approaches are smooth you so qualitative techniques positivist philosophy our reflexive approach and there are others we're not the only one but there are others are about qualitative techniques and a qualitative philosophy and then codebook approaches we called them big SQ sometimes we called the medium q because they're sort of a bit qualitative and a bit structured and a bit more positivist okay so I talked about those in a bit more detail so coding reliability this is the kind of somatic analysis that is closest to qualitative content analysis it's the kind of somatic analysis that has been around the longest and it's particularly widely used in the US where there's a real emphasis on positivism and there hasn't been the same tradition of qualitative research in many disciplines as there has in the UK and Europe and Australia and New Zealand and so on so small cue or coding reliability ta as I said partially qualitative qualitative data is collected qualitative data is analyzed it's not transformed into statistics and qualitative data is reported so extracts from interviews and so on but the underlying logic of the approach is positivist for some proponents and the main one is Y axis which are boy axis a blue book published in 1998 ta bridges the divide between qualitative and quantitative approaches so its advantages that it enables you to engage in qualitative research but in a way that makes sense to positivist researchers so he talked about ta as a translator of those speaking the language of qualitative analysis and speaking the language of quantitative analysis so this form of TA shares lots of values in common with positivism and import the importance of reliability the importance of replicability and so on those values haven't really shifted with a move to qualitative approaches so this would make sense in a moment so the emphasis in coding reliability proaches is ensuring reliable or accurate coding and we can see when our logic is positivist that that makes sense so themes are conceptualized as inputs and domain summaries and are often developed from data collection questions and coding is very structured it's guided by a code book or a coding frame and the coding frame is developed right at the start of the analytic process in some instances it's developed before there's any data collection data analysis and in other instances it's developed after some familiarization so it's structured and it doesn't shift it doesn't change you develop it excuse me and then you apply it to the data so the codebook will typically contain a list of clothes definitions for each code and label for each code information on how to identify the codes descriptions of exclusion or qualifications and examples so it's it's quite a big undertaking to produce your codebook and the idea is that multiple researchers would apply the codebook to the data set and often a lack of prior engagement and lack of prior knowledge with the focus of the research is seen as the ideal qualities for one of your team of coders that they come to the topic cold with no preconceptions and knowledge they're trained in the use of the codebook and they're all sent away on their own to independently work through the data and then encoding reliability approaches there's some kind of measure of coding reliability this is where I'm going to sound like I might understand statistics but I absolutely don't sir please don't ask me questions so coding agreement is typically calculated with Cohen's Kappa and a Kappa of 0.8 or higher is seen as reliable coding so the assumption is if the coders agree that they put the same bit of data in the same code then that is allows you to claim that your interpretation of the data is accurate and the coding is reliable obviously that is underpinned by a certain set of philosophical assumptions that are not mirrored in all forms of ta so we are a bit puzzled when we read papers and weary papers an awful lot that claim to use our approach and then combine it with coding with code books and coding reliability measures and we kind of wonder well how did how does that work how do you put those things together okay so I could be neutral and say this is one way to do it and there are other ways but for us this doesn't allow for the things that make qualitative research awesome it's too constrained it's too structured the things that make qualitative research great in our view a depth of engagement open-ended and flexible processes being open and exploratory emphasizing researcher subjectivity rather than seeing it as a problem to be managed reflexivity and so on so for us it doesn't represent what's exciting about qualitative work it bridges the divide by offering quite a impoverished vision of what qualitative research can be so let's think about so I should just mention the scores are this is ideal coding when everyone agrees what something is this is when we get to ideal coding so reflexive or organic approaches to somatic analysis represent both qualitative techniques and qualitative philosophy that it's an organic and iterative process to doing research so coding is fluid and it's flexible it's not fixed in any way so codes can evolve and change throughout the coding process you can rename them you split them into two or more codes you can collapse them together with other codes that you might do several sweeps through your data set of coding that coding is a sort of fluids and it's an open process and the aim is to reflect how the researcher is conceptualizing the data and how that conceptualization is shifting and hopefully deepening and growing and developing so it's not about accuracy it's not about reliability because those are thenis things that aren't possible it's about interpretive engagement depth of engagement and ensuring the coding process reflects the developing understanding of the data so it's about the researcher as storyteller actively engaged in interpreting the data through the lens of their own cultural membership and social positionings their theoretical assumptions and ideological commitments so it's not about curacy it's not about reliability it's about immersion and depth of engagement so you can see why from that standpoint coding reliability approaches don't seem to offer what's great about qualitative research because they're quite fixed they're quite rigid the themes are determined at the start of the process there's no opportunity for kind of flexibility fluidity and changing understanding the other thing that's really important about big cue qualitative research and I would say big use Matic analysis as well that's all some kind of ones are played is that it often has an explicit social justice orientation that where is coding reliability ta would see itself as aspiring to be kind of scientific and objective and managing and controlling researcher subjectivity that reflexive organic approaches have an explicit social justice agenda that might be as simple as giving voice to a socially marginalized group or it might be a more radical agenda of social change or social critique we haven't emphasized that in our qualitative writing today and I've realized through teaching that that's the sort of missing link in the chain that that's what distinguishes big cue approaches is that quite explicit social justice agenda and we're leaning towards calling it reflexive because we really want to emphasize the active role of the researcher in knowledge production but it's a fluid evolving approach but the researcher is at center stage it's the researcher that makes the research great it's not following procedures following procedures is no guarantee of a good quality analysis it's you that makes the analysis great and I know that's when I'm teaching students qualitative methods for the first time that's quite a terrifying thought that it's all on their shoulders but we are we are our primary tools techniques and instruments so codebook approaches and that's a Bletchley Park ok book they sit somewhere in the middle of the two approaches that I've just outlined so they share with coding reliability approaches are more structured approach to coding so you use the codebook hence the name codebook and themes tend to be conceptualized as domain summaries tend to be developed in advance of the analysis and then the coding process is that same process of putting the data into the themes but there's a bit more flexibility and fluidity there so for some code that proponents themes can shift and change and themes can be developed through the coding process and also the underlying philosophy tends to be qualitative rather than positivist so there approaches that sort of have a bit of one and a bit of the other and sit somewhere in the middle they tend to have been developed in applied context and a seen as having pragmatic advantages for applied researchers so the framework approach associated with the work of them Jayne Richie was an approach developed by social policy researchers who were getting pots of money to do a piece of research and come up with the results relatively quickly in order to inform a particular policy context so they wanted to develop a way of working that was quick that would enable teams to work together without the consensus coding approach and that would enable them to come up with kind of responses to quite defined questions relatively quickly so they see it as a kind of a pragmatic kind of approach that enables them to do these particular things and meet these particular goals okay so I have to get a game of Thrones referencing Jenny keeps taking them out I keep putting them back in so this is a quote from Brooks and colleagues who are template analysis proponents and it was something that stood out to us and we thought hmmm what do we think about this we feel that it's crucial that researchers are not Precious about their ways of working with somatic analysis and I think we come to the conclusion that we somewhat agree with this we have no investment in whether people use our approach or not there's you know there's no cash incentive or anything like that there's no benefit to us from it what we care about and what we care passionately about is that qualitative research is done well done thoughtfully done No li and that people use the right approach for their goals aims research question so I often get asked to review papers using thematic analysis and my most common response is use template analysis use framework analysis it's a much better fit with what you've done then Brown and Clark so the central message here is pick the approach that's right for you and enact that approach in a way that's thoughtful reflexive and knowing and aware rather than aspiring to do a particular approach and then do slightly odd strange things with it like people seem to do like we read lots of papers where people say following the procedures of Brown and Clark 2006 and then the outline a set of procedures and we think if they read our paper where do we mention code books they're saying they're doing code books and that we say so so that's the key message that we're trying to get across is there's lots of different approaches to TA out there it isn't one approach it's an umbrella term the approach is differ in philosophy the different technique pick the approach that's right for you we think our approach represents what's great about qualitative research but that's our view that's our opinion and other people might think differently about it so the main thing is you pick the approach that works for you that works for your research question so when is it useful thankfully I'm giving you a bit of a sense of that already the myths and truth thing is me being playful anyone that knows me well knows that I'm a social constructionist at heart so the idea that I can smash myths whenever is somewhat ironic so I've already talked about the fact that ta is assumed to be a modular singular one approach and it isn't another common assumption is that ta is an essentialist or realist method and again this is we think a misconception of ta what to think about ta compared to other analytic approaches is that it's a method not a methodology so approaches like grounded theory IP a discourse analysis narrative are in essence methodologies theoretically informed frameworks for research that delimit the kinds of questions you ask the kinds of data you collect how you sample or the theoretical underpinnings of your research they're sort of a whole package what's distinctive about ta is that it specifies theory at the paradigm level so it tells you what paradigm you're working with in depending on the approach that you pick so if you're coding reliability you're in a positivist paradigm if you're our approach you're in a qualitative paradigm but beyond that there's no Siri built in what's often misunderstood is that that means there's a complete absence of theory all that ta is just a sensualist or realist what it actually means is as a researcher you've got to build the theory into your approach we can't not do theory we're always doing theory even if we're not aware of doing Theory Theory shapes everything we do as qualitative researchers it shapes our way of engaging with our participants the questions we ask how we transcribe our data we're always making theoretical assumptions whether we do that knowingly or not is another question so theories not optional what's different about ta is you have to choose the theory that informs the work you're doing and I think once that's understood then the perception of TA shifts quite a bit that people can see that it's not a theoretical that it's theoretically flexible that it's not necessarily a sensualist or realist it can be but it can also be contextual is critical realist construction is post-structuralist because you have that choice and flexibility the other thing that we've heard we hear it less so though we did get an email about a couple of weeks ago it's that ta you can't do it in a doctorate because it's not sophisticated enough you've got to do a grounded Theory you've got to do an IPA you've got to do a discourse analysis I think that sort captures what I mentioned earlier that approaches don't come with an inbuilt sort of guarantee of sophistication if you sort of follow the procedures for grounded theory it doesn't mean you do a good analysis the guarantee of quality lies with you as the researcher about your depth of engagement your creativity your commitment your interpretive skill and so on so ta can be really unsophisticated or it can be really sophisticated complex nuanced and rich it really depends on how you use it I think because there's an anxiety provoking elements of qualitative research we can cling to procedures and see them as something that if we do exactly what so-and-so says become what we do we'll be good but in actual fact the goodness the richness the quality the complexity of analysis really rests with us as researchers and our interpretive skill so that was me watching The Avengers by the way Hulk smash and so another common assumption is that ta is just a descriptive approach that you just use it to describe but you just use it to look at surface level meaning that it's not really interpretive and so we see lots of examples of researchers kind of mashing up different approaches so there's an example where researchers have combined ta grounded theory and something else that I can't remember in order to do their analysis and they sort of say something like you know can a mat you can imagine that we wouldn't have produced such a rich analysis if we'd only use one approach and I thought hmm if you don't hear really well you would have come up with a great analysis how they used ta is was simply as a formal kind of data reduction or data summary or paraphrasing so again it can be descriptive but it can be other things as well it really depends on how you use it another comment that I found a bit strange is that when people are doing ta if there's data that they don't agree with they avoid it or censor it or ignore it that's not definitely not something we advocate openness exploratory nurse inquisitiveness and puzzling about data or sensual to good qualitative research practice that analysis isn't and a process of agreeing or disagreeing with your data it's in a process of unpicking what's interesting about it again something we came across recently ta is just for interview data just for kind of experience or research ta can be used in lots of different ways not necessarily with interviews the key is as I've mentioned flexibility so fixed in terms of paradigm but flexible beyond that as I said it's a method not a methodology so it can answer will be used to answer lots of different kinds of research questions we say language practice is the real exception so questions about technical aspects of language use associated with some narrative approaches discursive approaches can't do that no tools or techniques for doing that but beyond that questions about experience lived experience questions about people's views questions about factors that influence or underpin or contextualize particular phenomena using TA to in torah interrogate dominant patterns of meaning they're all possibilities there's a lot of flexibility in terms of research question most kinds of data interviews they used a lot focus groups but we've come across research with Diaries visual methods ta is becoming quite popular in participating approaches because participative approaches give you a kind of reticle framing and because of TAS flexibility it kind of slots quite nicely in also being used to lot in pluralist enquiry as well was the kind of framework within which different approaches used also I discovered it's being used quite a bit in ethnography in the States don't know why but it seems to be quite popular there also secondary sources online forums blogs websites magazines newspaper articles police reports in terms of data there's no real restrictions that we've kind of come across so far in terms of sampling and I can come back to this one the kind of thing that vexes us at the moment is the use of saturation as a criteria for determining sample size MTA it was originally intended as a cross case method so not an ideogram method so methods like narrative in IPA often have very small sample sizes because there's a focus on the detail of individual cases whereas ta is looking at patterns across cases but we have found examples of people using it in case studies and they're really nice examples so you know play kind of do fun things with it beyond what was originally intended or imagined and in terms of pragmatic rules of thumb for sample size it's really hard to be concrete if you've seen this book you'll know that we do have some concrete guidance for sample size in here that's aimed at student researchers what we say is a pragmatic rule of thumb for ta is at least five or six interviews for a small project assuming the data are rich the sample is relatively homogenous the research question is quite focused and the output is a dissertation where there's no intention to publish beyond that it becomes harder to be concrete but again I'm very happy to come back to that and talk about sample size the other thing that we've noticed is that just because I like using the word mashup mashups are really common people are kind of mashing ta up with other approaches so discursive somatic analysis narrative somatic analysis so playing around and combining methods in interesting ways Jeannie and I did a review of methods used in to feminist journals and what we noticed over a 12-year period was that grounded Theory became less common and ta became more common narrative approaches became less common discursive approaches became more common and what became increasingly common with mashups were people combining and using different approaches together so people are doing lots of exciting things which are really interesting the other thing that people are doing quite a bit is using TA for systematic review qualitative systematic review I know nothing about that please don't ask me about that because it's not my area of expertise so just very quickly and this is a bit of a joke if you're going to use an approach make sure you read the paper and we are genuinely often left wondering if people have actually read our paper or whether it's a citation of convenience for people the main thing I wanted to really highlight for people working at doctoral level for people doing published research is the importance of some degree of theoretical kind of knowingness for good quality ta so an understanding of the philosophical basis of inquiry so understanding the assumptions that underpin particular procedures or particular ideas and implementing them knowingly so the reason why we're kind of troubled by there's some of the odd things people do with ta so you're saying they're doing Brown & Clark and then use a codebook is that it doesn't seem to be a knowing active choice it seems to be a reflection of some kind of confusion about the philosophical basis of qualitative inquiry or some kind of acquiescence to the idea that positivism is best so what we're really encouraging is doing qualitative research from a point of knowingness and viewing theory is something that's enacted something practical rather than the really hard stuff that you think about and sweat over and then you go up with do the practical business of research that practical business is always theoretically informed so just very briefly for something more concrete we do have a checklist in the original paper that we've reproduced quite a few times and the thing that we've done recently is a checklist for editors and reviewers I've just got a I won't talk through it I've just got a reduced version here the full version is on our ta website it's a work in progress we'd love to have feedback about it we'd love to hear people's experiences so we can work it up into something kind of more polished it's relatively rough at the moment and it's a series of questions for editors and reviewers to think about when we're viewing ta papers if you're submitting ta papers and you do encounter some kind of hiccups which lots of people do do you draw reviewers and editors attention to these criteria we'd really like them to form part of the conversation around quality so just very very briefly the papers that I mentioned about domain summaries and why their problematic I've listed them here they are listed on our ta website so if you go to our ta website I think they're listed under other interesting papers so do have a read of those couple of papers using case studies that are quite interesting since 2006 we've written a lot we often ask ourselves how many chapters on ta can we write we're still going we're supposed not to be doing them anymore because we're trying to get our book finished and I slipped the other day and agreed to do a commentary and gin shouted at me so we have written quite a bit we try and offer something new in each and we try and share how our ideas and thinking are developing so we don't see the kind of 2006 paper is kind of static and that our thinking isn't evolving our thinking is evolving all the time we learn so much from teaching from the questions people ask us we a thinker getting better at kind of explaining things and understanding what we shouldn't take for granted and what we shouldn't treat is implicit the other one that's not on here is our book which is useful because it locates the approach within our kind of broader philosophy all the references are listed on our ta website if you google thematic analysis university of auckland it will be one of the first hits you've got frequently are asked questions on their basic guide to ta lots of other kind of our reading lots of other interesting meeting about ta the other thing that can be quite useful particularly if you're teaching is the companion website for our textbook but it includes lots of datasets including a focus group that's in audio as well as transcribed form lots of research materials and lots of things to support teaching so let's give it there you

Channel: Victoria Clarke

Views: 73,593

Rating: 4.9340401 out of 5

Keywords: Thematic analysis, Qualitative methods, Qualitative data analysis, Theme, Coding

Id: 4voVhTiVydc

Length: 61min 37sec (3697 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/bonemaid]

Nice, I'm just about to start marking up interviews so this was fantastically well timed

[u/[deleted]]

Oh fab thank you! Useful as I'm about to get stuck back into really getting my transcriptions coded up properly. This will be a perfect start to it!

[u/cellulosa]

Here is their relevant journal article as well

[u/[deleted]]

Need to come back to say I've now watched the video and read the paper. This is really what I needed to flesh out my analysis section!! It's funny how sometimes i can be working in a certain way that feels right, but then a talk like this reaffirms that I have obviously absorbed the information somewhere and I can now defenf myself better. Thank you so much again!!