Thematic analysis process
Creating the themes
1. Note down what you might be expecting to find. What theories of human behaviour drive your
understanding of what’s in transcripts. E.g. it’s all driven by money, we are powerless to do
anything, when people understand what’s happening they will make sacrifices, we want to
recycle, people don’t believe in climate change, the government is all say and no do ..... These
are all themes
2. Read all the transcripts
3. Identify most interesting, most irritating, most confusing, most disappointing, most unexpected,
most predictable, most moving, most funny pieces of transcript – what themes underlie these
charged episodes of transcript
4. Find other points of energy in the discourse by looking for the myths, metaphors and metonyms,
polarities and the paradoxes (the places of contradiction). Look for absence as well presence of
key ideas.
5. What feature of the quantitative data is of interest - a ecological footprint feature? Or a
demographic feature? Or both?
6. Name/describe these things as themes
7. Come together with other students (or your group) and discuss and share the themes you have
discovered
8. Additionally identify those themes that are answers to specific questions or specific prompts like
guilt, changes that people want to make, level of recycling.......
9. Identify themes that relate to specific theories that have emerged from you reading of the
literature.
10. Try to reduce your list of themes to a maximum of 3 themes that interest you. Practicum groups
need to allocate themes so that all the key issues are covered..
11. Use the semiotic square to generate some depth around the themes you want to explore. Place
your themes on a continuum, find their opposite, find a paradox within them. Use a thesaurus
and Google search to find synonyms and antonyms
12. Collapse themes that have the same or similar meanings, or group themes into themes and subthemes
13. Draw a map of themes and sub-themes, showing how the themes relate to each other
14. Create a list of words that seem to relate to each theme.
Create a demograph of your participants
1. Research Methods only students need to Identify which participants will be a part of their
sample and to justify this
2. Create a table of participant’s demographic features from the demographic information you
have collected – age, gender, occupation, spiritual context, etc. Use the filter to create profile
comparisons - young vs old, rich vs poor, high vs low education
3. Identify other demographic features that seem important in relation to the ecological footprint
measure (use the filter to create extreme values comparison ) and/or the key themes that are
emerging.
4. Identify demographic features that predict the likelihood that a theme will be present in a given
context. Key theories in the literature will point to this. What are the significant correlations?
Building the texts
1. Compile all your transcripts into one Word document.
2. Use the Find function of your word processor to locate all instances of the use of key word. You
can set the find function so that it highlights all examples of the word.
3. Copy each example of a piece of theme verbatim onto a new document and give a new page for
each theme and sub theme
4. Include a page reference and the name of the participant who created it
5. Seek new suitable search words as you develop your themes
6. Continue to look for the poles of your continuum, the opposites or paradox. absence
7. Continue to look for metaphor, metonym, myth, emotional resonance)
8. Check each participant in relation to the absence or presence of each theme
9. Be aware of patterns of theme use by different demographs within your participant group
Analysing the themes
1. Use techniques of deconstruction to enrich the themes. E.g. take a theme that is power laden
and deconstruct it. Use a commutation test, reverse the roles of the players with the theme.
2. Consider each theme in relation to your key demographic features.
3. Count how many participates hold themes and sub-themes in common
4. Use the straight forward descriptive qualities of themes to respond to the straight forward
questions about things like response to the carbon footprint questionnaire, the understanding of
global warming, etc
5. Identify how the themes are support or refute the literature or the theories that you have
started with
Writing up the themes
1. Work out the order in which you will address your themes and sub-themes. What’s the best way
to tell the story?
2. Take your first theme. If it has sub-themes, deal with the most used ones first. Each theme or
sub-theme will have a number of ways in which it is expressed. Identify these differences and
give examples using verbatim
3. Do not use long lists of quotes that say essentially the same thing. Summarise.
4. Try to integrate verbatim into your sentences where possible For example
Much of the usage of these sustainability words (“help”, “care”, “support”) describes a past
or present rather than a future context. Ten non-European migrants, seven of whom are
women, use helping and caring around supporting and being supported by family. Ming and
Vailima “care” for family members including a child who has a disability; Mae wants to
“help” her family more and likes “to have family around [because] it’s good to share things
together”; Tina , Matelita and Vailima talk about how family members “help” them at home
or with their businesses. For the men, Alebe, Mr Wang and Mr A, need to ”help” and
“support” their family members “back home financially”. Mr A has to “take care for [him]self
very well”, because his family depends on him. One woman, Alice, has to “send money back
home” to “help” her husband.
5. Fully explain the meaning of each piece of verbatim and the different perspective it is offering.
6. Identify the speaker of each significant piece of verbatim.
7. Identify whether the theme or sub-theme is strongly favoured by one demographic group when
compared to another and try to explain why this happens.