Research Methods · Simplified
Theme or Topic?
Four statements about the same extracts. Only one of them is a theme, and it is probably not the one that sounds like a finding.
Candidate 1 of 4
Extracts about asking, or not asking, in front of other people
Key terms
- Topic summary
- Names the subject matter. A reader learns what the extracts are about and nothing about what was found.
- Staging post
- A true, supported, descriptive sentence. A legitimate stage in an analysis, and not yet a theme, because nothing in it explains why these extracts belong together.
- Developed theme
- An analytic claim organised around one central concept, which the extracts illustrate rather than merely fall under.
- Overreach
- A statement the data cannot carry: it asserts a cause, an intention or a comparison the design cannot deliver.
The four together
Only one of them explains anything
Key idea: A theme is not a summary of what a group of extracts is about, and it is not a true sentence describing them. It is an analytic claim organised around one central concept, and the test is whether that concept explains why these particular extracts belong together. A statement everything fits under organises nothing. A true description that explains nothing is a stage on the way, and a great deal of published qualitative work stops there.
Four categories is a teaching simplification: real candidate themes sit on a continuum, and several of these could be argued into a neighbouring category by a good supervisor in ten minutes. The developed theme offered here is defensible rather than uniquely correct, and other themes built around other organising concepts would also work. The extracts are invented for teaching and no participant, interview, institution or study is represented.
The longer version has three clusters, twelve candidates and a rewrite challenge in which you turn a staging post into a theme. It is at Theme or Topic? in the main collection.