Thematic Analysis
- Created by: lydiamay89
- Created on: 14-01-16 15:10
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- Thematic Analysis
- A way of analysing data without losing its meaningfulness completely but enabling a vast amount of qualitative data to be manageably reduced into general patterns, trends and themes.
- you review and identify common themes within qualitative data
- a researcher will develop these themes into 'codes;which represent the categories of the themes found
- this can be done inductively where the researcher reads the qualitative data and themes emerge without them implying their own ideas or expectations
- or this can be done deductively where the researches specifies the theme that they are looking for prior to analysis of the data
- reviewed continually until the themes can be stated, supported and used in summary of the data
- a reflexive journal is kept to record the whole process
- highly flexible as it depends on the researcher but is often accused of being unscientific as it is greatly subjective = bias
- way of reducing a large amount of data into a summary without losing validity of the data if done well
- encourages the researcher to derive themes from the data rather than to impose pre-selected themes = better validity
- researchers often do not fully explain how they arrived at the themes = less valid
- (time consuming) identifying some themes at the beginning might be quite easy but identifying a limited amount that fully represent the data is difficult and requires time and skill
- researcher might have themes in mind prior to intial coding - validity can be doubted
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