Qualitative Research in Health Care by Catherine Pope & Nicholas Mays

Author:Catherine Pope & Nicholas Mays
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119410874
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9.6 Thematic Analysis

This can be the simplest form of analysis and, perhaps for this reason, it is the most commonly used in health care research. It can also be seen as the basis of all the other approaches to analysis of qualitative data. The researcher groups the data into themes and examines all the cases in the study to make sure that all the manifestations of each theme have been accounted for and compared. If the purpose of the research is primarily descriptive, or exploratory, or this work is a very small part of a mixed methods study, it may be sufficient simply to describe these thematic groupings. However, a stronger analysis will move beyond simple description to examine how the themes are interconnected. This involves trying to identify relationships between themes. Sometimes, the connections are obvious (e.g. only people from a certain social class or ethnic group hold particular views). At other times, it may be necessary to ask questions of the data to see how the themes are linked; for example, it is often worth looking for gender or age differences, or different responses to similar types of event (e.g. a crisis, or critical incident) and it can be helpful to revisit the literature on the topic as well.

Thematic analysis can be used to develop taxonomies or classifications, or to develop models or diagrams that express the connections between themes. Approaches based on ‘mind mapping’, including using the One Sheet of Paper (OSOP) technique [12], can help the researcher to see patterns in the data and ensure that all relevant extracts are accounted for. Thematic analysis often includes themes that are anticipated (e.g. through reviewing the literature, the researcher might be prompted to ask about particular issues) as well as those that emerge (i.e. that arise directly, or indirectly, during the fieldwork). As an example of an emerging theme, Chapple and Ziebland [13] did not anticipate that humour would play a large part in men's narrative interview accounts of their experiences of testicular cancer. However, it became clear that the use of humour helped men to demonstrate that they were confident that they would recover (testicular cancer is eminently treatable) as well as to affirm that they were still ‘one of the lads’. Humour emerged as an important theme in the interviews and led the authors to examine their data in the light of the sociological and anthropological literature on the role of humour and explore the various roles that humour served for these men.

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