To saturate or not to saturate? Questioning data saturation as a useful concept for thematic analysis and sample-size rationales

By Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke. 2019

3,483 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The concept of data saturation, defined as ‘information redundancy’ or the point at which no new themes or codes ‘emerge’ from data, is widely referenced in thematic analysis (TA) research in sport and exercise, and beyond. Several researchers have sought to ‘operationalise’ data saturation and provide concrete guidance on how many interviews, or focus groups, are enough to achieve some degree of data saturation in TA research. Our disagreement with such attempts to ‘capture’ data saturation for TA led us to this commentary. Here, we contribute to critical discussions of the saturation concept in qualitative research by interrogating the assumptions around the practice and procedures of TA that inform these data saturation ‘experiments’, and the conceptualisation of saturation as information redundancy. We argue that although the concepts of data-, thematic- or code-saturation, and even meaning-saturation, are coherent with the neo-positivist, discovery-oriented, meaning excavation project of coding reliability types of TA, they are not consistent with the values and assumptions of reflexive TA. We encourage sport and exercise and other researchers using reflexive TA to dwell with uncertainty and recognise that meaning is generated through interpretation of, not excavated from, data, and therefore judgements about ‘how many’ data items, and when to stop data collection, are inescapably situated and subjective, and cannot be determined (wholly) in advance of analysis.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a15405fd145610257fd02b8c49eee4da37e53249

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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, methodology): “Previous reviews 7,13 have evidenced that it is often very difficult to discern either from citations or the description of the analytic approach, what existing approach, if any, was followed, and also that it is common for authors to claim to ‘follow’ Braun and Clarke, but describe an analytic appr”
• 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).”
• A realist approach to thematic analysis: making sense of qualitative data through experiential, inferential and dispositional themes (2021, methodology): “More specifically for TA, they reflected that ‘we expressly developed TA as an approach embedded within, and reflecting the values and sensibility of, a qualitative paradigm’ (Braun and Clarke 2019a, 9).”