‘Thematic analysis has travelled to places that we’ve never heard of’: Astrid Coxon meets Victoria Clarke and Virginia Braun, to hear about using thematic analysis

Coxon, Astrid; Braun, Virginia; Clarke, Victoria

Abstract

Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke first wrote about thematic analysis – a technique for analysing qualitative data – in 2006, in a paper entitled Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology. Thematic analysis focuses on exploring patterning and meaning in qualitative data. The method enables qualitative researchers to make sense of the data they have collected from research participants, and/or from other sources, and develop and report the most significant ‘results’ in relation to the question driving the research. The questions it can help researchers address are vast – such as what it’s like to live with chronic pain, how people who choose not to have children are viewed in a society where having children is understood as a ‘normal’ and expected part of adulthood, or the way ‘healthy eating’ is represented in the media. Their 2006 paper, and the approach to thematic analysis they outlined in it and subsequent writing, has become widely used and cited in psychology and in many other disciplines.

Unlike quantitative research, which values striving for objective knowledge of the world, qualitative approaches like Braun and Clarke’s approach to thematic analysis embrace the idea that any ‘making sense’ of data will be shaped by the researcher’s values and positioning in the world. Qualitative researchers using thematic analysis are conceptually more like story tellers or sculptors than scientists. They spend time ‘getting to know’ their data and becoming intimately acquainted with its contents – known as ‘familiarisation’ – before engaging in a systematic process of coding the data. With coding, the goal is to understand, parse and tag (with coding labels – pithy phrases that evoke the data content and its analytic relevance) the full range of meanings relevant to the research question. Coding produces a lot of codes, and the researcher then clusters together similar and related codes, to develop ‘themes’ – multifaceted meaning-based patterns. The researcher actively works and reworks the clusters, to determine a set of themes that best captures and tells a story about important meanings in the data, related to the research question.

So how and why did Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke come to think about themselves as helping qualitative researchers become (better) story tellers? In this interview with Astrid Coxon, they discuss their thinking about and writing about thematic analysis.

• Journal Article Type: Other
• Acceptance Date: Nov 1, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Nov 30, 2021
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 6, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 6, 2023
• Journal: The Psychologist
• Print ISSN: 0952-8229
• Publisher: The British Psychological Society
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2022
• Issue: February
• Pages: 38-43
• Keywords: Thematic analysis
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10434608
• Publisher URL: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/thematic-analysis-has-travelled-places-weve-never-heard
• Related Public URLs: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/thematic-analysis/book248481