Chad R. Lochmiller 2031
the analyst has observed. Galvin, Suominen, Morgan, O’Connell, and Smith (2015) conducted
qualitative interviews with 12 mental health nursing students to explore how stress during their
training experience impacted them and to articulate what potentially caused their stress to
increase. The researchers identified “unreasonable demands” that arose during clinical blocks
as well as negative staff perceptions both related to increased stress among the 12 mental health
nursing students. Unlike the study conducted by Dodson, Baker, and Bost (2019), which largely
recounted participants’ experiences, this study sought to explain why a particular phenomenon
existed based on the repeated statements of participants in the study. As such, the study
provides an instructive example demonstrating how a theoretical idea can be introduced and
validated through the identification of repeated patterns in data.
Thematic analysis thus can be descriptive, explanatory, and/or critical in nature.
Thematic analysis enables scholars to define and describe what a participant’s reality is using
their own written or spoken account. This orientation summarizes what participants report and
therefore aggregates these understandings into identifiable patterns. As an explanatory tool,
thematic analysis can be used to infer meaning about experiences, perspectives, or belief
systems through the lens of a particular conceptual or theoretical framework. This approach
involves considering how the patterns found within data depict particular conceptual or
theoretical ideas. This approach requires the analyst to match patterns to a specific theoretical
or conceptual explanation. Thus, it is often undertaken when the analyst’s coding scheme is
defined a priori. Finally, as a critical analytic tool, thematic analysis can be used to identify
persistent gaps in the reported experiences of participants. These gaps are often representative
of recurring patterns which point to the existence of oppression, discrimination, or an
imbalance of power. The themes produced thus seek to elevate these patterns for the purpose
of scholarly interrogation and to potentially address these issues in practice, policy, or through
the development of enhanced social awareness.
Components of Thematic Analysis
Although scholars approach thematic analysis differently, I have found that this analytic
technique customarily includes three components: individual codes, categories, and researcher-
produced themes. Codes and coding practices have been described at length in the qualitative
methods literature (Saldaña, 2015). Codes are, quite simply, “a word or short phrase that
symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a
portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña, 2015, p. 4). Codes might be applied to a
single word, sentence, paragraph, or visualized portion of qualitative data. This data might
include interview transcripts, observational notes, researcher- or participant-generated journals
or notebooks, documents, open-ended survey responses, images (e.g., photographs or
drawings), video, websites or blog posts, written correspondence (e.g., emails, letters, etc.), or
published academic literature (e.g., books, articles, technical reports). Codes thus connect the
researcher’s analysis with the data s/he collected (Charmaz & Mitchell, 2001). In thematic
analysis, codes have a particularly powerful role as it is from individual coded segments that a
researcher’s identification of patterns begins. Individual codes often produce a sense of the data
that then informs how the analyst assigns value to different perspectives, experiences, or
recollections. Typically, in my own research, I tend to code large sections of text as opposed
to individual words. This tends to capture the essence of the experience that the participant
reported.
In my view, thematic statements ultimately depend on the development of robust
categories as codes are insufficient to produce themes. As Riessman (2011) observed, coding
causes “detail and specificity to slip away in favor of general statements about the phenomenon
of interest” (p. 311). Coding means that interviews and other data sources are “fractured” into