QualBuddyWriting up reflexive thematic analysis
Give the quotations
an argument.
A small example of moving from what participants said to what your interpretation helps us understand.
This guide continues QualBuddy’s fictional repair-workshop example. Ada and Ellis, their words and the analysis are invented. It illustrates writing within reflexive thematic analysis, rather than a reporting formula for every qualitative method.
01 / Decide what the theme explains
What is the reader learning?
The fictional study asks how people negotiate a place in a community repair workshop. One prewritten theme is “Being helped without being made smaller”. Its organising idea is that assistance can recognise a person’s competence or reduce their room to act.
A paragraph that only says “Ada liked the help, while Ellis did not” sorts the responses. An analytic account needs to develop what that contrast means for the question being asked.
Read the original passages and example codes ↗02 / Connect interpretation and evidence
A possible analytic paragraph.
Being welcomed into the workshop involved having one’s competence recognised, as well as receiving practical help. Ada valued being asked what she had already tried: she could arrive with “some knowledge”, rather than “just a problem”. The invitation made her contribution part of the repair. Ellis described the reverse movement. When a volunteer took the screwdriver from his hand, he “stopped talking and let them finish”, despite recognising their good intentions. Read together, these accounts suggest that assistance can widen or narrow a person’s room to participate. What matters in this reading is not simply whether help is offered, but how that help positions the person receiving it.
Make a claim
The opening connects welcome with recognition of competence. It gives the extracts an analytical purpose.
Stay specific
Short quotations preserve the wording that supports the interpretation. The explanation attends to what asking or taking over does in each account.
Develop the relationship
The closing brings the contrast back to participation. It offers a reading of these passages without claiming to describe every workshop encounter.
03 / Return to the material
Keep the argument open.
Two vivid extracts do not establish an entire theme. In the wider fictional account, Ada brings biscuits so that receiving help feels less one-sided. That detail complicates a simple story in which recognition is only something a volunteer gives. The participant also works to negotiate it.
- Does the interpretation address the research question, rather than only the interview topic?
- Can the reader see how the quoted words support the claim?
- What elsewhere in the accounts challenges or changes this reading?
- Have I preserved differences between participants as I develop a pattern?
- How might my assumptions make this interpretation attractive to me?
Use the answers to revisit the theme or the paragraph. A neat piece of writing is not evidence that the analysis is finished.
04 / Carry the work forward
From workspace to Word.
In QualBuddy’s reflexive TA workspace, choose the themes and quotations to include in findings, develop the analytic narrative and export to DOCX. Keeping an extract organised is useful; deciding what it means and how to write about it remains your work.
See the reflexive TA workflow ↗Working with IPA instead?
IPA has its own terminology and analytical commitments. Our separate case example follows exploratory notes, experiential statements and PETs, with an editable worksheet and an actual Word analysis-table sample.
Explore the IPA Word resources ↗Download QualBuddy →