methods: analysis of qualitative data using thematic analysis

Question 1

what is qualitative data?

Answer 1

• non-numerical data

Question 2

how is qual data gathered?

Answer 2

• through interviews, questionnaires, case studies and observations

Question 3

how can qual data be converted into quan data?

Answer 3

• counting instances of event occurring

Question 4

what is thematic analysis?

Answer 4

• way of analysing data without losing its meaningfulness but enables a vast amount of qual data to be more manageably reduced into general patterns, trends and themes

Question 5

how is thematic analysis achieved?

Answer 5

• reviewing and identifying themes in the qual data
• can be done inductively or deductively

Question 6

how is inductive thematic analysis achieved?

Answer 6

• researcher would read and reread qual data gathered
• themes would emerge from data without researching imposing any of their own ideas or expectations from it

Question 7

how is deductive thematic analysis achieved?

Answer 7

• researcher specifies the themes that they will look for before analysing the data

Question 8

what is the procedure of thematic analysis?

Answer 8

• carefully reading and considering the qual data gathered
• identifying themes present in the data that occur frequently or seem to be a key feature of the data
• how frequent or central to the text the theme is depends on the opinion of researcher or nature of material analysed
• researcher will develop these themes into ’codes’, which represent categories of themes found
• researcher will then use these codes to analyse data gathered and search for instances where it appears in data
• this is reviewed continually, and changed if necessary, until themes can be stated, supported and used as a summary of the data

Question 9

strengths of thematic analysis or other qual analysis

Answer 9

• very flexible, and many researchers use it in different ways
• despite the fact that there’s very little control over how thematic analysis is conducted by individual researchers, qual analysis does yield far more detailed and meaningful info than quan data

Question 10

weaknesses of thematic analysis or other qual analysis

Answer 10

• often considered to be unscientific because themes are highly dependent on subjective opinions of researcher, can lead to researcher bias