PU565 Unit 6 Thematic Analysis Reflection Example

My Three Best Quotations Were the Weakest Part of the Draft: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Taking Findings Built Around Stigma Into the Room and Leaving With a Theme About Information Nobody Had Given Anyone

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PU565: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar and the draft findings are the writer's own composite work; the analytic concepts and the research cited are real.

What I Took In

A four-page draft with three themes. The first and longest was stigma, supported by three quotations I had been carrying since the second interview: a man saying he would rather miss half of church than sit at the front, a woman saying her sister wears one and looks it, and a retired teacher saying he had spent forty years at the front of a room and was not going to start wearing his age on his ear. I thought the section was the strongest thing I had written this term.

What the Group Did With It

Four reactions, in the order they came. One classmate asked how many of my twelve transcripts the stigma theme drew on. The answer was five, and three of those five were the quotations I had already used, which meant the theme rested on three speakers rather than on the data set. A second classmate read my own appendix back to me: six of the twelve participants said, in different words, that they did not know whether the drugstore devices were the same thing as a hearing aid or what the difference was. I had coded that as nobody explained the choice and treated it as background. A third asked what the stigma passages had in common besides being vivid, and the honest answer is that two were about being seen and one was about professional identity, which are different claims. A fourth asked the question that reorganized the draft: if six people do not know what the product is, what is the stigma attached to? My three best quotations were doing the work of a theme, and six quieter passages were doing the work of a finding.

What I Had Actually Done Wrong

I had promoted the most quotable code to a theme, which is the error the methods reading warns about directly: a theme has to capture something patterned across the data set, not something striking in one corner of it (Braun & Clarke, 2006). My draft had the shape of a magazine piece, with the quotations deciding the structure. The information theme was less interesting to write and better supported, and I had let the writing decide the analysis.

What I Changed

The reorganized draft leads with what participants had not been told: what the over-the-counter category is, how it differs from a prescribed device, who fits it, what happens if it does not work, and who to ask. Stigma remains as a theme rather than the theme, built on the five transcripts that support it and stated at that strength. The professional identity passage moved out of stigma into a smaller theme about what hearing loss is taken to mean about competence. And the appendix line about third-person framing, which I had noted in the coding memo and then forgotten, is now part of the information theme, since describing the problem through what others say is consistent with not having been given a frame of one's own.

What I Am Keeping Against the Group

Two classmates thought stigma should be dropped as a theme altogether and the quotations used as illustration elsewhere. I disagree, and the reason is in the data: three participants describe avoiding specific social settings rather than devices, which is a behavior with a cost and not only an attitude. Research on stigma in hearing loss finds exactly this pattern of social withdrawal, so a theme at that strength is defensible even when it is not the leading finding (Wallhagen, 2010).

What This Changes About How I Draft

Two rules out of one hour. Before writing a theme, count the transcripts it draws on and the speakers inside them, and put that count in the draft where I can see it. And draft the least interesting candidate theme first, because the vivid material will survive being written second while the quiet finding will not survive being written last. The count matters more than it looks: work on how quickly new material stops appearing in interview sets shows most categories arriving early, so a theme resting on three speakers out of twelve is a thin claim rather than an emerging one (Guest et al., 2006).

What I Still Cannot Tell

Whether the information theme is a finding about my county or about the two pharmacies that stock the devices there. With twelve interviews drawn from three recruitment routes in one county, I cannot separate those, and the survey phase will have to ask about information directly if the claim is to go anywhere. That is a design consequence of the seminar, and it is also the first time this term that a seminar has changed what I plan to measure rather than how I write it up.

References

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903

Wallhagen, M. I. (2010). The stigma of hearing loss. The Gerontologist, 50(1), 66-75. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnp107