Journal of NELTA, Vol 25 No. 1-2, December 2020
66
NELTA Journal 2020
My mother has also guessed some of the important questions,
especially essay topics, for the SEE and she has asked me to write the
answers of those questions.
Parental support
I memorised a lot of answers for the test. Memorisation
The above table indicates the sorts of operations involved in the data coding process. In
order to have an overall picture of the codes, all the 116 codes, along with some relevant
extracts, were exported from the NVivo and presented on a table. The table supported
her to further understand the nature of the data in the study.
Phase Three: Searching for Themes
This phase, as suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006), began with a long list of the codes
that were identifi ed across the data set. The main purpose of this phase was to fi nd out
the patterns and relationships between and across the entire data set (Chamberlain,
2015). The codes had to be analysed considering how different codes could be combined
to form an overarching theme (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In other words, the major focus
in this step was on the analysis at the broader level of themes, rather than codes. As
Brown and Clarke (2006) point out “a theme captures something important about the
data in relation to a research question and represents some level of patterned response
or meaning within the data set” (p.10). Therefore, it was important to conceptualise
those codes as the building-blocks and combine similar or multiple codes to generate
potential themes in relation to the research questions (Ansari, 2015).
This phase was the most diffi cult phase in the analysis process. In order to ease the process,
following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) suggestions, a list of the codes was prepared on a
separate piece of paper and then they were organised into theme-piles which refl ected
on the relationship between codes and themes. Because of the explorative nature of the
study, it was also important to return to and re-read all the transcripts before clustering
codes according to the themes. Thus, the transcripts were re-read and different codes
were combined into potential themes, collating all the relevant coded data extracts
within the identifi ed themes. When developing the themes, the author could bring in
the concepts and issues that she had previously identifi ed in her literature review. She
found that some of the themes from the literature review were truly meaningful and
some codes could be subsumed under them.
Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest that themes in a study should be prevalent in most or
all of the data items. However, any sort of relevant information, though it appeared in
a few sources, was considered in this study. In order to cluster all the codes, a thematic
map was initially created (displayed in Figure 1) which contained 12 overarching
themes (namely: test fairness, test accuracy, test diffi culty, test support for educational
development, test support for career development, doing well on the test, instruction
clarity, psychological domain, importance of English, learning English after the test,
test preparation, and parental involvement). As the main purpose of creating main