Content & Thematic analysis

• Content analysis


  A statistical process that involves categorising and quantifying events and behaviour, studying communications indirectly
• Coding in content analysis

  1. Get to know the data thoroughly

  2. Identify/devise important categories

  3. Work through the data and count/tally the number of occurrences of each category
• Reliability in content analysis

  • Test-retest reliability - repeat the analysis on the same data
  • Inter-rater reliability - have a second researcher independently analyse the same data
• Thematic analysis


  A technique used to identify patterns of meanings and themes in data
• Thematic analysis procedure


  1. Use coding to initially analyse the data

  2. Review the data/codes looking for emergent themes

  3. Support themes with direct quotes

  4. Check validity by collecting new data
• Strengths of thematic analysis

  • Allows patterns in data to be analysed allowing conclusions to be drawn
  • Can be replicated as the data can be retained and accessed by other researchers
• Limitations of thematic analysis

  • Subjective as judgement is needed to define categories and coding units, requires identifying sources of bias
  • Reducing data can remove detail and reduce richness