Here's a snippet from our upcoming UX research book:
Chapter 12 - Qualitative Data Analysis
"Thematic analysis for qual data"
There are several ways to approach qualitative data analysis.
In most qual experience research, thematic analysis will be your best bet.
Why?
It’s possibly the most “intuitive,” approachable, flexible, and inclusive approach out there.
But what is thematic analysis?
Thematic analysis is about recognizing the themes or underlying patterns within your data.
Some folks confuse content analysis with thematic analysis.
The content analysis uses frequency to help make sense of data, while thematic analysis finds patterns within qual data.
While you can count how often a theme appears in some data, this approach isn’t always perfect for experience research (see Chapter 12, Part C “Making Themes” for more).
It’ll be harder for your team to view frequency effectively to learn about the qual data with small samples.
But the meaning within and underneath a set of qualitative data can resonate with your team, even if you only had a few participants.
The diagram above outlines the general process when using thematic analysis.
But HOW do you effectively use this approach?
^we break down these steps + much more in our book:
appleandbanana.org/bookwaitlist