Conducting Thematic Analysis with Qualitative Data

Abstract

This article discusses one approach to conducting thematic analysis using structured qualitative data collected from focus groups. Thematic analysis is one of the most used but often poorly defined approaches in the qualitative research community. The method is principally concerned with the identification of patterns which are then reported as researcher-generated themes. In this article, I use data obtained from the Qualitative Data Repository to demonstrate how secondary qualitative data can be analyzed to produce themes. I note the ways in which this process unfolds as well as how it differs from other techniques.