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Understanding and representation, such as ‘How do lay people understand therapy?’ or ‘How are food and eating represented in popular magazines targeted at teenage girls?’.

People’s experiences, or people’s views and perceptions, such as ‘What are men’s experiences of body hair removal?’ or ‘What do people think of women who play traditionally male sports?’.

This means it can be used within a range of theoretical frameworks, to address quite different types of research question related to: One of the advantages of (our reflexive version of) TA is that it is quite theoretically flexible. If you prefer a visual intro, you can watch us giving a lecture about our approach, a couple of years ago (given our thinking evolves, time is important to note). For these reasons, it’s really useful to look up our most recent writing – all listed among our resources. We have written extensively about our approach since then, and our thinking has developed in various ways. We initially outlined our approach in a 2006 paper Using thematic analysis in psychology.

We call our approach ‘reflexive TA’ and it differs from most other approaches in terms of both underlying philosophy and procedures for theme development. Our new book Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide provides a comprehensive discussion of different aspects of TA. This lecture by Victoria provides a useful introduction to these different approaches. In the FAQs you can find some explanation of the similarities and differences. We broadly think there are three clusters of similar types of approaches to TA, which we have termed coding reliability TA, codebook TA, and reflexive TA. They tend to share some degree of theoretical flexibility, but can differ enormously in terms of both underlying philosophy and procedures for theme development. TA is not a singular method – TA is best thought of as an umbrella term for a set or family of approaches for analysing qualitative data that share a focus on developing themes (patterns of meaning) from qualitative data. The method can be and is applied in lots of different ways, to lots of different datasets, to address lots of different research questions, and within a range of theoretical frameworks! It’s a very versatile and accessible method, which is part of its appeal.

Patterns are generated by the researcher through a rigorous process of data familiarisation, data coding, and theme development and revision. The purpose of TA is to develop patterns of meaning (‘themes’) across a dataset that address a research question. The method has been widely used across the social, behavioural and more applied (clinical, health, education, etc.) sciences, and beyond. Thematic analysis (TA) – briefly – is a method popular for analysing qualitative data in many disciplines and fields.