Thematic Analysis Method By Boyatzis

The researcher conducted a process of encoding qualitative information using the "thematic analysis method by Boyatzis (1998). This method consists of four category theory-driven codes, derived from the researcher's or other existing theories; inductive codes, derived bottom-up from the researcher's reading of the data; and prior-research driven codes. This helps the researcher moves his analysis from a broad reading of the data towards discovering patterns and developing themes. Also, the researcher develops "codes," words or phrases that serve as labels for sections of data.
Depending on the methodology and research question, codes can come in many shapes and sizes. Referring to a set of codes, Boyatzis explains, “This may be a list of themes, a complex model with themes, indicators, and qualifications that are causally related; or something in between these two forms.
Thematic analysis is flexible and what researchers do with the themes once they uncover them differ based on the intentions of the research
The researcher will occasionally hear qualitative researcher quip informally that TCA is not an analysis at all. In Phenomenological Research, an elaborate and articulate set of procedures requires researchers to situate identified meaning units in relationship to context and structure for each participant and then for the participants as a whole. Analogous procedures are found in Case Study, Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Grounded Theory, Heuristic Research, Intuitive Inquiry, Narrative Methods and variant derivative methods. Case Study, Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Grounded Theory, Narrative Methods, and Phenomenological Research vary considerably in epistemological stance depending on the researcher and variant of the method used. (See Creswell (1998) and Fischer (2006) for overviews, case examples, and references for qualitative