In some thematic analysis approaches coding follows theme development and is a deductive process of allocating data to pre-identified themes (this approach is common in coding reliability and code book approaches), in other approaches - notably Braun and Clarke's reflexive approach - coding precedes theme development and themes are built from codes. Coding is the primary process for developing themes by identifying items of analytic interest in the data and tagging these with a coding label. Thematic analysis goes beyond simply counting phrases or words in a text (as in content analysis) and explores explicit and implicit meanings within the data. This method can emphasize both organization and rich description of the data set and theoretically informed interpretation of meaning. Thematic analysis is used in qualitative research and focuses on examining themes or patterns of meaning within data. 5.5 Phase 5: Defining and naming themes.5.4.2 Level 2 (Reviewing the themes against the entire data-set).5.4.1 Level 1 (Reviewing the themes against the coded data).5.2.2 Data complication (Coffey and Atkinson ).5.2.1 Data reduction (Coffey and Atkinson ).5.1 Phase 1: Becoming familiar with the data.5 Braun and Clarke's six phases of thematic analysis.2 Different approaches to thematic analysis.The popularity of this paper exemplifies the growing interest in thematic analysis as a distinct method (although some have questioned whether it is a distinct method or simply a generic set of analytic procedures ). Their 2006 paper has over 120,000 Google Scholar citations and according to Google Scholar is the most cited academic paper published in 2006. They describe their own widely used approach first outlined in 2006 in the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology as reflexive thematic analysis.
Leading thematic analysis proponents, psychologists Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke distinguish between three main types of thematic analysis: coding reliability approaches (examples include the approaches developed by Richard Boyatzis and Greg Guest and colleagues ), code book approaches (these includes approaches like framework analysis, template analysis and matrix analysis ) and reflexive approaches. Different versions of thematic analysis are underpinned by different philosophical and conceptual assumptions and are divergent in terms of procedure. Thematic analysis is best thought of as an umbrella term for a variety of different approaches, rather than a singular method. Thematic analysis is often understood as a method or technique in contrast to most other qualitative analytic approaches - such as grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis - which can be described as methodologies or theoretically informed frameworks for research (they specify guiding theory, appropriate research questions and methods of data collection, as well as procedures for conducting analysis). It emphasizes identifying, analysing and interpreting patterns of meaning (or "themes") within qualitative data. Thematic analysis is one of the most common forms of analysis within qualitative research.