8/17/2019 Defining Themes and Codes

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Defining themes and codes

‘Themes’ are features of participants’ accounts characterising particular perceptions and/or

experiences that the researcher sees as relevant to the research question.

‘Coding’ is the process of identifying themes in accounts and attaching labels (codes) to indexthem.

Researchers will generally choose to define features as themes where they recur several times in

the data set, within and/or across transcripts. his is not, however, a hard and fast rule. !f a single

comment made by one participant is particularly helpful in elucidating their account, you maywant to devise a theme that encapsulates it and include it in your template.

!t is important to recognise that themes in qualitative research are not hiding in the data, waiting

to be "discovered’ by the researcher. Rather, they arise from the engagement of a particular

researcher with the text, as he or she attempts to address a particular research question. #s such,they are pragmatic tools to help the researcher produce their account of the data. $hen deciding

whether and how to define themes, %eep this pragmatic intent in mind, as% yourself the question,

"if ! code the text in this way, is it li%ely to help me build my understanding of the data&’