Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis identifies, analyses and reports patterns of meaning across a qualitative dataset. It is the most widely used qualitative analytic method in thesis research because it is flexible, not tied to any single theoretical position, and accessible to researchers new to qualitative work.

Braun and Clarke's six phases are the standard reference: familiarising yourself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes against the coded extracts and the whole dataset, defining and naming themes, and producing the report. The process is recursive rather than strictly linear.

A theme captures something meaningful about the research question — it is not simply a frequently occurring topic, and a common weakness is presenting a summary of interview questions as themes. State whether your approach is inductive or theoretical, and semantic or latent, and support each theme with verbatim extracts from more than one participant.