Troubling themes

This presentation aims to trouble the idea of themes in qualitative inquiry. Thematic analysis is one of the most common ways of dealing with interview data. Usually basic themes are abstracted after a preliminary reading, then these themes are grouped and finally an interpretation offered based on the thematic structure of the text. Many implicit assumptions operate at all these levels and should be ‘troubled’. The action of identifying themes is practically based on the notion that any qualitative material has in fact an underlining structure composed of recurrent ideas. Grouping themes assumes that ideas are hierarchical in nature and interpretation talks about the need to grasp the ‘latent’ meaning of what is only ‘manifest’ in the data. I will argue here that themes need to be understood in a much more dynamic and relational way and used not to reconstruct meaning but as ways of actively constructing it