Thematic Analysis: in conversation with Virginia Braun & Victoria Clarke
Ahead of their webinar on 16th November (GMT), 17th November (NZ) we caught up with Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke to discuss their new book, Thematic Analysis, A Practical Guide, using social media as an academic and changes within qualitative research in Psychology.
Your new book, Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide, comes out at the end of this month. What has the writing process been like?
Victoria: It took longer than we would have liked! But we do tend to write rather long books! And we have been engaged in a process of reflection in the last few years around how our early writing on thematic analysis (TA) has been misunderstood and misrepresented, and how our assumptions around TA, and some of the language we used, may have contributed to that. So, we’ve been responding to these misunderstandings and misrepresentations in various papers - around the concept of saturation or research design in TA research, for example. The book represents the culmination of that process of reflection, and captures the re-articulation of our approach in a way that incorporates the developments in our thinking around and understanding of TA since we first wrote about it in 2006.
Ginny: In terms of the practicalities of our writing process, we’ve been collaborating and writing together since that first paper on thematic analysis in 2006. Sometimes we write together in the same physical space, but with me in the New Zealand and Victoria in the UK, more often than not we are working over email, with occasional Zoom chats. For bigger projects like the book, we have to navigate the practicalities of different academic calendars - when I have time for writing, Victoria is often busy with teaching and vice versa. But somehow, we make it work! We’ve actually evolved a way of writing together that seems to work well.
The timing and calendar differences are probably another reason why things take longer than we would ideally like. But just as there is value in slowness for the process of doing TA, there is value in that slowness for our methodological writing, there is value in putting things down and picking them up again. Not that there isn’t frustration in having to spend time getting your head back into something after putting it down six months ago! But the space and time to reflect and think deeply about things, I think and I hope makes us better methodological writers, better able to articulate the practicalities of doing TA as well as the underlying values that inform and shape the process.
Your 2006 paper in Thematic Analysis has over 100,000 citations on Google Scholar and reflexive TA is widely popular approach to qualitative research. Why do you think that is?
Ginny: No-one has been more surprised by the popularity of the paper than us! Prior to venturing into methodological scholarship, we were both critical psychologists researching gender and sexuality and speaking to small, specialist audiences of largely like-minded academics. The shift to a global, multi-disciplinary platform has been an interesting one! The main feedback we get from both students and academics highlights the accessibility of the paper - the fact that it breaks the process down into its constituent parts and explains concretely and practically what different procedures like coding involve. Rather than just telling the reader to “code the data” and not really explaining what that means or looks like.
Victoria: I think as well the “in psychology” part of the title - “Using thematic analysis in psychology” – has been ignored. Although we wrote for psychology, the accessibility of the paper has meant that it speaks to readers in many different disciplines and fields of research, which is fantastic. The flexibility of the methods and process we outlined is also part of its popularity - it’s less constrained than methodologies like grounded theory and IPA in the formulation of research questions and the focus of research, there is flexibility around the theoretical assumptions that inform and underpin the practice, and there are very few constraints around research design, data collection methods, and size and constitution of the dataset. It can be thought of as a DIY method - in that it gives readers some tools for practice, but also gives them lots of freedom in how they make use of those tools.
What’s your top tip for someone starting out at doing TA?
Victoria: it’s hard to settle on one top tip - brevity is not our strong point! - but I think “give yourself time” is probably the most important piece of advice we can hand people starting out. Obviously, lots of people doing TA don’t have all the time in the world, and can have various constraints around their research – so in that context, we’d say plan your time effectively to give yourself as much time as possible for data analysis. TA, and qualitative data analysis more broadly, always takes longer than people expect - I think virtually every student we supervise comments on this! But reflexive TA is a process that really prioritises depth of engagement, dwelling with your data, and spending time reflecting on what they mean, and what stories you can tell about them. Good quality TA is definitely not the result of a once over lightly process! You need to give yourself time for reflecting, pondering, and making connections. This means time to put your data down and let your thoughts about it just percolate away in the background. In some ways we can see reflexive TA as part of the slow academia movement - it’s a process that benefits from time and space. It’s not a process that prioritises things like efficiency and speed.
You’re known for saying ‘themes do not emerge!’ in thematic analysis – can you elaborate on that?
Ginny: If we have a catchphrase, that’s probably it! It’s partly tongue-in-cheek and silly, but it also captures something serious about how themes are conceptualised in reflexive TA, and how the role of the researcher in TA is understood. The notion that “the themes emerged from the data” conjures up an image of themes bubbling to the surface of the dataset and the researcher catching them in a net and fishing them out. This image is problematic in a few ways. This phrasing can reflect – or invoke – an assumption that themes are real things residing in data, that they pre-exist any analytic efforts on the part of the researcher. Secondly, it positions the researcher’s role as one of discovery, of finding the themes in the data, like the discovery of buried treasure on a sandy beach. The phrase is problematic because it evokes a process and practice very different from how we conceptualise both themes and the role of the researcher in reflexive TA.
In reflexive TA, themes don’t pre-exist the analysis, rather they are the products of it. The researcher creates themes through their analytic engagement with the data, through data coding. Themes are interpretive stories the researcher tells about the data. In this understanding, the researcher is active – by which we mean a key part of the process, not a conduit for the product to ‘emerge’ from the analytic process. They are more like an artist or sculptor, creating and shaping the analysis with their tools and all else they bring to the research process, than a detectorist. As discursively trained scholars, we know how much language matters, how much metaphors matter. Hence, themes do not emerge, in reflexive TA.
Having said all this, it’s important to acknowledge that there are other understandings of the term emerge, and particularly emergent, in qualitative research. Emergent is often used to capture induction in approaches like grounded theory and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) - grounded theorist talk about emergent design and lower level themes in IPA are called emergent themes. So were not seeking to ban the term emerge/emergent! Rather were inviting researchers to reflect on their process, assumptions and conceptualisations. On whether - if they use a phrase like “the themes emerged” -they are conceptualising themes as buried treasure, and their role as one of discovery? If they are, such conceptualisations are not a good fit with reflexive TA, and a different approach may better suit their project.
You are both very active on Twitter, how do you think social media can benefit (or hinder) a career as an academic?
Victoria: What drew me to Twitter is our early experiences of teaching TA and qualitative research to academics and students outside of our institutions - we learnt from this that many if not most students doing qualitative research for their dissertation or thesis are doing so without the expert supervision that we were privileged to experience as PhD students, and as a Master’s student in Ginny’s case. We were genuinely shocked by some of the things students told us they were advised to do by their supervisors. These experiences really reoriented our understanding of the qualitative research community.
We’d been trained in an environment in which the academics all cared passionately, and wrote, about methodology and this was reflected in the methodological training we received. Although we understood our environment was special in some way, we also assumed it was a slightly shinier version of the experience that other PhD students were having! We also assumed that many people engaged in qualitative research were deeply knowledgeable about it, and that in many contexts, what you might call ‘first principles arguments’ for qualitative research had been accepted, that the debate was now between more experiential approaches to qualitative research and critical approaches. And that positivist qualitative research was a thing that only people with limited knowledge of qualitative research did!
What we learnt from our early teaching experiences was that first principles arguments for qualitative research were still having to be made in many research fields and contexts, and that there was still a need to make the case for non-positivist qualitative research. Moreover, the specialist debates and discussions that expert methodologists were having did not in any way reflect the wider practice of qualitative research - many qualitative researchers were still defending qualitative per se, arguing with reviewers and editors about codebooks and coding reliability measures, or invested in these as good practice themselves because this is what they’d been taught. In this context, Twitter provides us with another platform for communicating about TA and qualitative research directly with students and other academics and hopefully providing some support and guidance to people without access to expert supervision, training and mentoring.
In terms of advice about using Twitter, I would think about what you want to get out of using it. If you want to have a platform or a voice on Twitter, then to be most effective you need to carve out a niche, have a particular profile or focus for your Twitter activity. Academics who tweet about anything and everything tend to have less reach and influence on Twitter than those who have, for the sake of a better word, a clear “brand”.
Is there a change you would like to see within qualitative research in Psychology, or the world of research in general?
Ginny: Contrary to any perception that we want reflexive TA to become this all conquering behemoth, what really motivates us is encouraging more knowing practice within qualitative research, whether reflexive TA or not (and not using TA as a thought-less default). By knowing practice, we mean engaging in qualitative research deliberatively and with awareness about what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Qualitative approaches are not just techniques you apply – the have ‘logic frameworks’ and values that guide what is and isn’t good practice, and what is and isn’t valid. I think more knowing practice would mean a lot of the things we find problematic in relation to TA research, and qualitative research more broadly, would be far less evident. A lot of the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding TA reflects unknowing practice - a lack of understanding of the assumptions and values underpinning particular procedures and practices. If, for example people understood the assumptions that underpinned practices like the use of codebooks, coding reliability measures, member checking or saturation then they would be able to work out for themselves when these practices were and weren’t appropriate. More knowing practice from reviewers and editors would also be greatly appreciated! As gatekeepers for quality in qualitative research, unfortunately they are often letting us down, and encouraging the publication of incoherent qualitative research. The more of this type of research is published and is in circulation, then the argument for knowing practice has to get louder and stronger to be heard above the din of conceptual confusion and positivism creep.
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About
Virginia Braun
University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Virginia Braun is a Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a feminist and critical (health) psychologist and teaches around gender and psychology and critical health psychology at undergraduate and graduate levels. When she gets time for it, her research (sometimes in collaboration with Victoria) explores the intersecting areas of gender, bodies, sex/sexuality, health, and (now) food. She is on Twitter @ginnybraun, where sometimes her tweets about qualitative research, usually in that case a retweet of an awesome thread by Victoria.
Victoria Clarke
University of the West of England, UK
Victoria Clarke is an Associate Professor in Qualitative and Critical Psychology in the Department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, where she teaches about qualitative methods, and gender and sexuality, and supervises student research, on a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. When she's not busy collaborating with Ginny, she has conducted research in the intersecting areas of gender and sexuality, family and relationships, and appearance and embodiment. She is also active on Twitter – mainly tweeting about thematic analysis and qualitative research @drvicclarke.