After analysing the data, I felt the themes were too broad. Spending a substantial amount of time differentiating analytical methods, in a short space of time, resulted in the use of a culmination of analysis methods. After watching Victoria Clarke’s ‘What is thematic analysis?’ (2017) I realised that my themes were instead ‘bucket themes’ encompassing overall summaries of the text . And so, I returned to analyse the data. Some may see this as unnecessary, particularly a week before submission, however I felt this would strengthen my findings – particularly in a study with limited participants.
I began refamiliarising myself with the entire data set, searching for implicit and explicit meaning, to develop singular descriptive codes. These were then reanalysed against the data to add, remove or combine codes where necessary and related codes were grouped together to create themes. I found it useful to create a sentence for each theme as a central organising system. This process aided in the combination and removal of similar codes and revealed more nuanced ideas than the original analysis. I later revisited the data, checking the themes against the text and completed another round of analysis grouping codes for each section of the data. This revealed common themes across participants for each question/activity.
Some interesting findings emerged:
- All participants artefacts linked to their profession progression or awareness in some way.
- Clothing played an important role in participants self-image, giving the item more sentimental value.
- All items chosen related to experienced memories, rather than specific categorisations.
- All participants attended to enhance their skill level.
- Students utilised process based methods for problem solved but preferred segmented and experiential learning activities.
- Community and peer learning was important but not a driving motivator.
My thoughts on the final themes can be seen in the next blog –
Victoria Clarke (2017) What is Thematic Analysis? 9 December 2017. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4voVhTiVydc&t=39s&ab_channel=VictoriaClarke (Accessed 9 December 2023)