Thematic Analysis for a
Qualitative Interview Study

RESEARCH QUESTION

What the Study Set Out to Explore

This thematic analysis example follows an education research team that interviewed teachers about how they adopt a new classroom feedback practice. The team does not want a list of answers to each interview question. It wants to report patterns of meaning: what teachers are trying to protect or achieve when they change the way they work.

The question is exploratory and interpretive, so it is stated as an open question about experience, not as a hypothesis to test. The analysis is planned to produce themes that are grounded in what participants said and open about the analyst's own role in shaping them.

STUDY DESIGN AND DATA

Semi-Structured Interviews, Fully Transcribed

About 20 semi-structured interviews with teachers from several schools, each lasting 40 to 60 minutes, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants were recruited purposively to vary by school type and teaching experience. The research team's own analyst conducted the interviews and holds the full dataset, so familiarity with the material sits with the person who will lead the coding.

METHOD AND ASSUMPTIONS

Why Reflexive Thematic Analysis, and What Rigor Means Here

Reflexive thematic analysis fits a question about patterns of meaning across a dataset, where the analyst's interpretation is treated as part of the method and not as a source of bias to be removed. The protocol, written before coding began, names the research team's analyst as lead coder. Because coding is interpretive and owned by that analyst, no coder-agreement statistic and no saturation target are planned. The analyst codes, develops candidate themes and writes the account.

OnlineSPSS works alongside that process, not in place of it. When the first candidate themes mirror the sections of the interview guide, they are reviewed with the analyst, who returns to the data and recodes around what teachers are trying to achieve. Each candidate theme is checked against the full set of transcripts, and one is split when a negative case shows it holds two distinct patterns. Quality is judged by trustworthiness, not by statistics: a coherent coding approach, a reflexive log, a traceable record of every revision, and final themes anchored in extracts from several interviews.

OUTPUT AND INTERPRETATION

What the Analysis Produced

The analysis produces a small set of themes, each with a short definition, the boundaries of what it covers and extracts from several participants that carry it. The research team writes the narrative interpretation. OnlineSPSS reviews each candidate theme, checks the final themes against their supporting extracts and notes where a theme rests on too few voices or overlaps with another.

The audit trail records how the coding framework changed: which codes were merged, which theme was split and why, and what the analyst decided at each step. The write-up describes the findings as an interpretation of this group of teachers, not as a statement about all teachers, and avoids counts or percentages that would imply a statistical sample.

REPORTING

What the Researcher Received

A methods paragraph on the reflexive approach, structured to the COREQ checklist for interview studies (SRQR if the target journal prefers it) and formatted to the journal's requirements. The authorship boundary is plain: the analyst's coding, the themes and the interpretation belong to the research team, and OnlineSPSS provides methodological review and documentation.