5.2 Thematic analysis

Thematic analysis is a common way of analysing qualitative data, such as responses to surveys, interviews and focus groups. It was developed by Braun and Clarke (2006) and is ‘the process of identifying patterns or themes within qualitative data’ (Maguire and Delahunt, 2017, p. 3352). Within policy research, the aim is to identify themes within the data and use those themes to make recommendations for future law reform.

Braun and Clarke’s method (Braun and Clarke, 2006) has six stages:

1. Become familiar with the data: read the transcripts, survey responses or other data collected several times.
2. Generate codes: highlight in the text where the same issue is being raised by different respondents by using a different code (colour, letter, number) for each separate issue.
3. Generate themes: consider the codes identified above and identify the higher-level patterns which ‘captures something significant or interesting about the data and/or research question’ (Maguire and Delahunt, 2017, p. 3356).
4. Review the themes: gather together all of the information about each theme (e.g. by using cut and paste) and make sure the themes are coherent, relevant and distinct from each other.
5. Define and name the themes: ensure the names of your themes accurately reflect them and think about how the themes relate to one another
6. Locate exemplars: when writing up the analysis, you need to tell the story of the themes, with relevant examples.

Please read the following worked example of thematic analysis in the following article, available through a general internet search:

• Maguire, M. and Delahunt, B. (2017) ‘Doing a thematic analysis: a practical, step-by-step guide for learning and teaching scholars’, All Ireland Journal of Higher Education, 3, p.3351.