(Mis)conceptualising themes, thematic analysis, and other problems with Fugard and Potts’ (2015) sample-size tool for thematic analysis

By Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke. 2016

525 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of us (VC) was having a conversation with a student recently about the origins and history of thematic analysis (TA). The student had read Qualitative Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy (McLeod, 2011), a text which presents TA as a variant of grounded theory. Victoria commented that she thought that TA evolved from content analysis, and therefore predated grounded theory, and discussed her recent discovery of the use of a variant of TA in psychotherapy research in the 1930s-1950s. The student let out a heavy sigh and slumped in her chair, bemoaning her ability to ever fully grasp qualitative research in all its complexity. This reaction is not uncommon. Students learning and implementing qualitative research at times find it bewildering and challenging; simple models of ‘how to do things’ can appear to offer reassuring certainty. But simplified models, especially if based in confidently-presented-yet-partial accounts of the field or an approach, at best obfuscate and at worst lead to poor quality research. In our discipline (psychology), students typically learn about qualitative research only after they have been fully immersed in the norms, values and methods of scientific psychology. Many find it difficult to let go of what we call a ‘quantitative sensibility’. For such students, and others not well versed in a qualitative sensibility, Fugard and Potts’ (2015) tool for determining sample sizes in TA research has great intuitive appeal; it provides a life-raft to cling to in the sea of uncertainty that is qualitative research. Thus, we share Hammersley’s (2015) concerns that their tool will be used by funding bodies and others (e.g. editors, reviewers) to determine and evaluate sample sizes in TA research. We fear it will result in further confusion about, and further distortion of, the assumptions and procedures of qualitative research. We here build on concerns expressed by others (Byrne, 2015; Emmel, 2015; Hammersley, 2015) to briefly highlight why this quantitative model for qualitative sampling in TA is problematic, based on flawed assumptions about TA, and steeped in a quantitative logic at odds with the exploratory and qualitative ethos of much TA research.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3592237d37cf52aed0ddd71357c6f516dc1b4411

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Citations in the corpus

Supporting best practice in reflexive thematic analysis reporting in Palliative Medicine: A review of published research and introduction to the Reflexive Thematic Analysis Reporting Guidelines (RTARG) (2024, background): “27 Here, themes are often implicitly treated as real things that exist in data and which the researcher ‘identifies’ or ‘discovers’.”
Saturation controversy in qualitative research: Complexities and underlying assumptions. A literature review (2020, methodology): “Further emphasizing the controversy, Braun and Clarke (2016) submits that contrary to the conceptualisation of themes by Fugard and Potts (2015) as ontologically, clear and discrete things that are in the littered in the data, just like “diamonds” waiting to be picked, themes are determined and…”
‘A starting point for your journey, not a map’: Nikki Hayfield in conversation with Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke about thematic analysis (2019, background): “…Clarke, and Terry 2014; Braun, Clarke, and Weate, 2016; Clarke and Braun 2016), encyclopaedia entries (Clarke and Braun 2014a, 2014b), commentaries (Braun and Clarke 2016, 2019; Clarke and Braun 2018) and editorials (Braun and Clarke 2014; Clarke and Braun 2017), and created a website…”
Learning to Do Qualitative Data Analysis: A Starting Point (2020, background): “Relatedly, some scholars have argued for the importance of recognizing that thematic analysis is not uniformly enacted (Braun & Clarke, 2016), as there is notable diversity in how it is conceptualized and carried out (e.g., Braun & Clarke, 2006; Boyatzis, 1998).”
‘Define, Explain, Justify, Apply’ (DEJA): An analytic tool for guiding qualitative research sample size (2021, background): “Moreover, even though the qualitative research arena has done well in developing ‘quality standards’ that meet its multidimensionality aims (Braun & Clarke, 2016), researchers tend to resort to linear thinking that quantifies the qualitative or they apologise for the inability to do so.”
A realist approach to thematic analysis: making sense of qualitative data through experiential, inferential and dispositional themes (2021, background): “Indeed, these explicit demarcations have been made manifest with the introduction of the label organic TA (Braun and Clarke 2016) and more recently reflexive TA (Braun and Clarke 2019a).”
One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? (2020, unknown): “…2019a ; Clarke and Braun 2016; Clarke, Braun, and Hayfield 2015; Terry et al. 2017), encyclopaedia entries (Clarke and Braun 2014a, 2014b), commentaries (Braun and Clarke 2016, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Clarke and Braun 2018) and editorials about TA (e.g. Braun and Clarke 2014; Clarke and Braun 2017).”