Put simply, you may be looking for the right way to explain or express patterns in your content. > Watch Webinar to Learn how you can use NVivo for Thematic Analysis When might you choose to do thematic analysis? It traverses traditional qualitative research and quantitative data, allowing researchers to ask more questions of their content. It can be done manually (by hand), in Excel or through a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) software tool. Text sources such as documents, interview transcripts, open-ended survey responses or articles.

It is used to find common themes in content such as: Thematic analysis is not a methodology but a tool which can be used across different methods (Boyatzis 1998). Here at QSR International we break down the ambiguities of thematic analysis as an approach, and hope this interpretation can breathe new life into it, as new and emerging forms of content become more integral to the already established research tool. The practice of thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative analysis but sometimes not acknowledged or confused with other approaches.