Qualitative mini-project report
Conduct a thematic analysis of an excerpt from an interview held in the healthtalk.org website, a resource containing stories from real people collated by researchers. Then, write an empirical report of three themes you have identified in your analysis of the interview in answer to the following research question:
What themes does Morag draw on to talk about the transitional moments in her life?
Word limit: 2000 words (excluding title, abstract, references and appendices)~(The assignement layout is uplaoded)
Student notes
For this assignment you will produce an empirical report that draws on psychological topics and methods. One of the key themes concerns how we come to understand periods of fixity and moments of transition across the lifespan. This assignment develops this theme by asking you to use thematic analysis to explore how people make sense of themselves in their social world. This will allow you to consolidate your understanding of how psychological theory and qualitative research can be applied to a specific context.
There are three stages to this assignement: data collection, data analysis, and report writing. Make sure that you read all of this guidance before beginning your assignment.
Relevant material
The following resource will be useful in completing your report:
You need to identify a minimum of two relevant peer-reviewed psychology journal articles that you have found through an independent literature search. If you do not include and discuss two relevant journal articles, you will lose five marks from the overall score for your assignment.
Stage 1: Data collection
For this mini-project, the data has been provided for you. It is becoming more and more common for researchers to use naturally occurring data, such as documents or newspapers, or pre-existing data – data that has been collected by other researchers or for different reasons (sometimes called ‘secondary data’). The UK Research Councils keep a database of the research projects they have funded and of the data collected by those projects.
In this assignment, you will be using an interview from the healthtalk.org resource. This is a collection of interviews from academic research exploring a broad range of health and wellbeing issues. If you are interested, you can explore the resource yourself by following the link above. The interview that you will be using comes from research focusing on ways of improving healthcare provision for people with a chronic pain condition, fibromyalgia.
The excerpt that you will be analysing comes from a longer interview with Morag (pseudonym), a 48-year-old British woman. In your excerpt Morag discusses the development of her symptoms and her diagnosis of fibromyalgia, and the impact of this on her life and work.
You have been provided with two versions of the interview transcript – a PDF and a Word document. You will need to download one of these for your analysis. Both versions of the transcript contain line numbers which you should refer to in your report when discussing extracts from the interview. You should include a list of initial codes, developed codes and themes in your appendix.
Stage 2: Data analysis
You will be conducting a thematic analysis of the interview.
You should start by familiarising yourself with the data (phase 1) before attempting coding. Remember to keep the research question in mind as you read: What themes does Morag draw on to talk about transitional moments in her life?
TMA 04 interview transcript with line numbers (PDF version)( This have been uploaded)
You can then move on to coding (phase 2).
Once you have completed this stage, you can move from the developed codes to identifying themes (phases 3–5)
If you were conducting a real study, it is likely that you would be working with a much larger dataset. Most thematic analysis is done on multiple transcripts, but it is still possible to carry out a thorough coding and theme development process on a single transcript. For TMA 04 you will be working with an extract from a single transcript and will need to generate three themes and write each of these up.
You might find that you initially generate more than three themes in your analysis. Once you have identified your themes, try to write a few notes on each and select the three themes that you feel best answer the research question. When writing up your themes, ensure that you include your interpretation of the themes supported by illustrative quotes from the data. When presenting quotes, remember that you will need to include the line numbers as they appear in the transcript. Qualitative researchers don’t provide quotes in isolation but instead they explain how a quote fits into the identified theme and show how it helps answer the research question.
Stage 3: Writing your report
Having completed your analysis, you can move on to writing up your report (phase 6). Remember, when tackling this task, you may find it easier to write the sections of the report in a different order to how they will be finally presented.
