I am looking for an 'approved' approach for undertaking a thematic analysis, and presenting this, of studies within a systematic review. The studies included are a mixture of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. There are numerous articles relating to using thematic analysis for synthesising the results of qualitative data but they don't quite fit the bill. What I am using this for is examining the themes which come out in the discussions of the papers in relation to some specific issues. Just wondering if there is an approved approach I can use as a reference point when doing this.
In general, you organise the literature into themes or clusters either inductively or according to predefined criteria. You can look at:Article Towards a Methodology for Developing Evidence-Informed Manag...
This article discussed many approaches to synthesize the literature qualitatively. This is a reference paper in the domain.Here is a very recently published article that conducted a thematic analysis, take a look: Article Blockchain in general management and economics: a systematic...
Good luck!
Elaine - not sure what you are looking for that would be different to the 'mass' of systematic reviews out there that use a 'themed' approach. Some identify specific approaches i.e. Braun and Clarke (which actually fits better with spoken interview narrative than written narrative) while others use 'looser' methods and/or may not describe how the themes emerged - other than through a form of critical appraisal of an identified corpus.
I am familiar with applying the principles of Thematic Analysis to the review of qualitative research, but I cannot understand how it would fit with quantitative research. What would you be coding and how would you be converting those codes to themes?
Quite frankly, looking for themes in quantitative research strikes me as equivalent to looking for effect sizes in qualitative research -- trying to fit a square peg into a round hold.
Thanks for the replies and my apologies for the slow response. David Morgan - the review is of literature on international healthcare education collaborations with the aim of determining what makes them work or fail. The themes factors which act as enablers or challenges to the process and are coming from discussions within the papers.
David L Morgan Ramesh Kumar Dean Whitehead Rami Alkhudary
In the typical application of thematic analysis to systematic reviews of qualitative research, the goal is to locate themes that apply across the results of the various studies. In particular, the Results sections of qualitative studies are frequently organized around themes (or their equivalents), so thematic analysis in this case amounts to a way of aggregating and comparing the findings from the separate studies.
I thus am having difficult seeing how this connects to factors that are "coming from discussions within the papers." It certainly would make sense to determine which factors were considered in the quantitative literature, and them use that as a coding framework to determine whether and how these same factors apply in the qualitative literature, but that would not be thematic analysis.
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