Unit 4: Construct, refine and substantiate themes; Write up
: Step three of our thematic analysis framework is constructing themes from your codes – essentially, aggregating codes into broader themes that speak to the questions you are trying to answer in your research.
: Theme construction is an active process – again, emphasis on active – that is explicitly informed by your research questions and implicitly guided by your theoretical or conceptual framework. Going back to the codes from my sample project – I aggregated three of those codes: “private sector dominance in agenda setting,” “problem definition/agenda setting,” and “multilateral/bilateral policy partnerships” into the encompassing theme, “scientific evidence needs to play a greater role at the level of problem framing.” End of quote.
: My interpretation of those codes was informed not just by the data, but also – and importantly – by all the reading I had previously done around the so-called policy process and the normative role of scientific evidence at different stages of that process.
: With this framework and my original questions as a foundation, I was able to look at the codes I had generated and say, what the data is telling me is that scientific evidence doesn’t play enough of a role here and it needs to play a greater role for the process to yield more responsive policies. Following step three, you often find that you have to go back and forth, burnishing your themes, or refining them, to clarify the insights you are trying to convey.
: The final themes that appear in your published work typically do not come fully formed. You may find that you have to expand or collapse individual themes to arrive at final themes that are at once more concise and more encompassing than you had before.
: This is step four: the fine tuning of the big ideas that are emerging from your thematic analysis. In our sample project, step four yielded these three themes that ultimately became the building blocks of the overall narrative or story of the paper that resulted from the study. This is how it works. The themes aggregated from your codes, however many they are, are the original insights that build up to the conclusions you are going to present from your study.
: Again, this applies to studies that rely wholly on secondary data, as in literature reviews, as much as it does to primary research. I would like to reiterate this point here because I get asked by postgraduate students all the time if it is acceptable for them to produce and/or publish research that is only based on the existing literature.
: My answer is yes – but have you been able to clearly define the story that your literature review is trying to tell? After you have summarised what everyone else has said, what are you saying? What is the upshot of the analysis you have undertaken? Thematic analysis will help you respond to these questions that are asked from a critical reading and writing perspective.
: By generating codes and constructing themes arising from your review of the literature, you are able to draw particular patterns or view the research problem from a particular angle that no one else has done before. And that is the definition of originality in research.
: Step five is about fleshing out the themes you have identified with supporting data and discussion. And these form the core of your final paper or thesis. Here, especially in qualitative research, it helps to be able to narrate your themes in flowing prose rather than, say, in the bullet point format favoured for presentations.
: A particularly effective way to substantiate themes in qualitative research is to integrate excerpts from interviews, focus groups, et cetera, at strategic points to validate your claims at those points and to further enrich the narrative. The effect is often profound, as you can see with this interview quote in our final paper used to substantiate our claim that certain stakeholders had disproportionate influence over the energy policymaking process in Nigeria.
: I thought this was a powerful quote because it shows, quite bluntly, just how ingrained the practice of including certain groups in the policymaking process while excluding others has become in the context. This step of substantiation is important because, in the process of aggregating up to your final set of themes, there is quite a bit of reduction that has gone on.
: You have combined, condensed, and compressed a whole load of data along the way. So, every chance you get at this stage to illustrate your argument with powerful quotes like this is very valuable in helping the reader zoom into some of the very important granular detail that was perhaps collapsed earlier out of necessity.
: By the time you are done with step five, you will have been quite far along on step six, which is to write up your research. In this last step of your analysis, you want to do two key things. One: tie your thematic analysis in with your literature review on the one hand, and theoretical framework section on the other hand, in a way that explicitly addresses your research question.
: And two: offer broader interpretations of your findings and themes in light of the theoretical or conceptual framing you adopted in your work. Here is a snapshot of the final paper that emerged from the sample project we have been referring to all along. This is just to offer a reminder that all of the hard work involved in thematic analysis – and yes, it can sometimes feel like a hard slog – does pay off in the end.