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We distinguish between three main types of TA – our reflexive approach, coding reliability TA and codebook approaches, which include methods like template analysis and framework analysis. We also discuss the difference in this lecture. (Ed.), Handbook of research methods in health and social sciences (pp. We have written about this in this chapter:Ĭlarke, V., Braun, V., Terry, G., & Hayfield N. We discuss this in detail in our TA book:īraun, V., & Clarke, V. Writing usable qualitative health research findings. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 22(3), 351-372. The concept of theme as used in qualitative nursing research. Clinical Nurse Specialist, January/February, 51-57.ĭeSantis, L., & Ugarriza, D. Underdeveloped themes in qualitative research: Relationships with interviews and analysis. To understand more about the differences between topic summaries and fully realised themes, we recommend the following three papers:Ĭonnelly, L. These theme names identify that, for example, ‘benefits of X’ was an important area of the data in relation to the research question(s), but they don’t communicate the essence of this theme they don’t tell the reader something specific about these benefits and what underlying concept underpinned what the participants had to say about the benefits of X. ‘Experiences of Y’ or ‘Benefits of X’ are classic examples of topic-summary type theme names. Sometimes the confusion between topic summaries and themes is simply an issue of poorly named themes – the theme itself is a conceptually founded pattern, but the theme name does not reflect this. To make things complicated, some approaches to TA do conceptualise themes as topic summaries (but rarely do so deliberately and knowingly – with an awareness that there are other conceptualisations of themes) – this conceptualisation of themes is evident in both coding reliability approaches (see Boyatzis, 1998 Guest et al., 2012) and codebook approaches, such as template, framework and matrix analysis. More simply put, a theme captures an aspect of patterned meaning in the data and tells the reader something about the shared meaning within it, whereas a topic summary simply summarises participant’s responses relating to a particular topic (so shared topic but not shared meaning). In our reflexive approach to TA, themes are conceptualised as patterns in the data underpinned by a central concept that organises the analytic observations this is rather different from a topic summary, and the two should ideally not be confused when using our approach. Unlike themes, there isn’t anything that unifies the description of what participants said about this topic – there is no underlying concept that ties everything together and organises the analytic observations. A topic summary is a summary of an area (topic) of the data for example, a summary of everything the participants said in relation to a particular topic or interview question. The difference between a theme and a topic or domain summary is a source of frequent confusion in much published TA research.