I'm currently conducting research looking at the information needs of hospital patients. My research questions are:
a) what are patients' experiences of receiving information in acute hospital?
b) what are patients' early information needs?
I'm using Braun & Clarke's (2006; 2019) reflexive method of thematic analysis, which states that themes represent "patterns of meaning across a dataset", rather than being organised as answers to specific questions. While I have a number of themes that meet these criteria, I believe it would also be clinically relevant to have sections entitled "most useful sources of information", and "most important information topics". However I'm worried that these may be viewed as "under-developed themes". If anyone has any guidance on this it would be greatly appreciated.
It feels like you are distinguishing between the interpretive themes you develop and the practical advice that you provide on "most useful sources of information", and "most important information topics". I agree that if you treated those two topics as themes they would indeed be "under developed," but that need not be the case if you first develop a set of interpretive themes, and then use those themes to organize and present the more practical information.
In some ways, this might be a distinction between what goes into your Results section (the themes) and what goes into your Discussion section (the practical implications of those themes).
Thanks David L Morgan that all makes sense, thanks for your response
Hi,
I noticed the superlative form in your practical advice topics, as David L Morgan called them. I might ask, what kind of processes lead you to emphasize certain topics in your study, to consider them best ones. In other words: where do the criteria for "most useful" and "most important" come from?
Regards,
Juha
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