Speaker 1: So in this video I will explain briefly some basic rules for presenting the results of thematic analysis, how to present the results of thematic analysis. I will discuss several aspects of that presentation, so I will start with the overall structure of a chapter, the results chapter, if you have conducted thematic analysis in your study. Then I will move on to the structure of individual sections, so sections in which you will be discussing individual themes. in your study. And then I will also talk about some general rules regarding the the overall layout. So how do we even present themes? Do we use tables? Do we use models? What else do we use? And then I'll show you examples from a published study, a big study funded by the British Council. I was one of the authors and I was responsible specifically for the qualitative results and these were the results of thematic analysis. So I'll show you real examples so that you can understand how different techniques and different approaches to how to present the results of your thematic analysis. So let's start with the structure of the chapter. So you have conducted thematic analysis in your study and you need to structure your results chapter somehow. So the most important rule, it may sound obvious but it's really not that obvious, the most important rule is simply that you should present your your thematic framework to the reader. In a few minutes I'll tell you how to do it in terms of layout. So do use tables or models or other visual tools. So you're presenting, you want to present your thematic framework to the reader, and then you want to move from one main theme to the other. So that's how ideally your results chapter should be structured. So these main themes are usually individual sections, which I'll explain in a second as well. And within each main theme, usually you have some sub themes, But the overall structure again is you simply want to present the main themes and take turns describing and discussing each of the main themes in your study. When it comes to the order in which you want to present these themes this will be up to you. So what I usually do when I sit down before writing the chapter or the results section or whatever I'm working on in terms of presenting my thematic analysis results, I sit down and in my head I try to think of a coherent narrative, so like a story of my data. Sometimes I literally imagine myself explaining this data to somebody, or you may actually explain, try to explain your data to somebody, to your family member. The reason it helps is that the only rule, there is no real rule that says you cannot do this, or you should, you have to do this. The only rule is that it should be coherent, it should be understandable, there should be a nice flow to your chapter. For this reason, like I said, I sit down and I think about how I want to present it. So, you don't have to present your themes, for example, depending on how strong they were, or how many times they were discussed by part, part, part, by, by, by, by your participants. by your participants by your participants but rather by how they contribute to your story how do you want to start your story, what would it make sense what would make sense to start your story with so think about it this way, if you were talking about if you were presenting at the conference or talking to your friend or mother or a wife or husband about your data and what you found. Where would you start? Would you start with talking about general patterns and comparing your participants? Would you start with something else? So that's, it should be almost common sense. What would make sense, you know, in your opinion? So sometimes, so I rehearse that in my head, as I said, and sometimes I want, for example, initially to start with a given theme, but then I think, okay, actually, If I want to discuss this theme, I would have to make too many references to this other theme, but the reader is not familiar with the other theme yet, so okay, so maybe actually I will start with the other theme, because then it will make more sense once I move to this theme, because then I will be referring back to what the reader already knows about the other theme. So like I said, common sense is more important here than anything else, and it is your decision regarding the order. So how do you want to present these themes? So like I said, generally your chapter will consist of individual sections, and individual sections will discuss your main themes. So the second point in this video are individual sections. So within each individual section, you want to present a given theme, so one of your main themes. Ideally, you want to start with a brief summary or brief explanation of what this theme was, so explain it to the reader. And then move on to evidence, so give evidence of the presence of these themes in your data. By evidence, of course, I mean some extracts. Extracts, quotes, this is really what makes qualitative research, in my opinion, so interesting, so interesting to work on, but also so interesting to read to the reader. So it should be, again, like I said, it should be a story. So you're presenting, so you're introducing the topic, you're introducing this theme, and then you're moving from one participant to the other and contributing and adding a little bit more to that theme by extracts. Then you discuss the extracts, so you don't really just want to throw these extracts, many, many extracts there and leave them with no comment, but rather, you want to provide extracts as evidence of what you just said. And then, ideally, after the extract, Again, you want to at least refer to it or interpret it a little bit more. Here, one very important thing that I want to mention. This is one of the key points in this video and one of the key errors, I think, key mistakes that people tend to make. As I said, you want to go theme by theme, generally in your chapter, and then in your section, you want to focus on one theme and you want to go through different participants. You don't have to go through each participant, so that's important as well. You don't have to cite every single participant. Again, you are in charge of that decision, how many extracts you want to provide and how many participants. But a very important point is that you are focusing on this one theme. So you're not focusing on exhausting the data from one participant and then moving on to the other. Some people do it and in some approaches it's more acceptable, it's more common. So perhaps in ethnography, for example, or detailed case studies where you just want to describe your case, your participant, and this participant is the basis of the structure of your chapter because you could do that as well. So you could divide the chapter into participants, but that's only in some, like I said, some specific approaches. Usually you want to follow the structure that I mentioned. You want to move from one theme to the other and this means that within these sections you want to, when you talk about participants you only want to give relevant extracts that refer to the theme you are discussing in this one section and then in the next section the following section when you talk about another theme you can come back to this participant and again give an extract from his or her interview. So that's that's probably the most important thing to remember when presenting the results of thematic analysis. So now finally before I show you the actual section and the published paper that I mentioned, I want to talk about the layout of how to present themes. Do we use tables? Do we use graphs? What do we use? It won't probably help you that much to know that there is no rule that says you should or you have to use this kind of a presentation. There is no such rule. So again this will depend on you and your preferences. I would say that it's quite common and I'm personally a big fan and a big proponent of and supporter of the idea of using tables so tables are probably one of the most common tools or ways to present your thematic framework. Simple tables so tables where you present your theme and perhaps depending on what you focus on in your study either decoding frequency so how many times it appeared or how frequent it was, how strong it was in your data. Some people like to give a definition of a theme in that table as well, in one of the columns. Some people like to provide an example extract. So this will depend on you, but I think tables are probably the most effective way to present your thematic framework, especially at the beginning. So when you introduce and when you start the chapter, when you introduce the thematic framework, before you move on to the discussion that I mentioned of of individual themes, it's probably good to show a nice table that summarizes the whole thematic framework. So then it will obviously make it easier for the reader to navigate through your themes as you discuss them in individual sections. But then, of course, feel free to, in addition to your table, or sometimes instead of your table, to use other forms of presentation, of visual presentation. It could be a diagram, even a simple diagram. It could be some kind of a model. So really, it's up to you, again, how you decide to present these themes. Sometimes it makes more sense to use some kind of a model, especially if you're talking about some kind of relationships. If you've developed a model, an explanation, or a theory of how something works, of course the table is not that effective. I would still argue that it's good to start with a table, even in that case, but I would probably add this model right after the table and explain that the themes the table are explained, the relationship between them is explained in this model. So this will really depend on you and your study as well. Also apart from certain differences and characteristics of your study, what will determine whether you use any visual representations like a graph or a model is of course individual preferences and not just your preferences but also your reader's preferences. So there are people who are more visual and they prefer visual representations. so I think for this reason it's always worth adding some kind of a visual. Some people simply prefer this kind of presenting the data. I'm not good with models or graphs and I really struggle to even think of a clear and nice model but one of my PhD supervisors when I was a student I remember she always insisted on me using models because she preferred this kind of presentation and this showed me that there are really different types of people in this world. So it's always good to think about your audience and a variety of different preferences. And finally, sometimes it's even acceptable not to use any models and not to use any tables. Again, it depends. Perhaps your thematic framework is extremely straightforward and short. perhaps some parts of your data do not need a model or visual representation because you may be just summarizing you know some some main key points about let's say demographics or some kind of characteristics of your participants and you may feel like it doesn't make sense to put them on you know any other any kind of a model so models again they are good for example for relationships sometimes for some attitudes and beliefs but they are not so good for demographic characteristics it doesn't make much sense I can't imagine where you would possibly put these characteristics on a model unless these characteristics are believed to have an influence on something where of course it would make sense to you know link them with an arrow or something to another theme but otherwise it may be a bit weird to to include this kind of information on a model so sometimes the point is sometimes you don't even need any kind of a visual representation. So it's very flexible. But to summarize I believe that perhaps using a table, I would strongly suggest that you use a table and some kind of a simple graph or model if it makes sense considering your themes and the themes that emerged from your study. So now let's quickly have a look at the study that I mentioned. So again this was a big, large study. It was about a certain educational approach which is called English medium instruction it was funded by the British Council and I was one of the authors I was responsible for qualitative data analysis and for writing the qualitative results sections so let's have a look okay so this is a study that I told you about as I said it was a study of a certain instructional approach which is EMI English and English medium instruction it's a good study it's a example simply because there is a variety of ways in which we presented the findings and also there is a variety of data. It was a mixed method study, there is questionnaire data, there are open-ended questionnaire results which were also analyzed thematically, there are focus groups, there are interviews. So let's go to my interview results section. The first thing that you can see here actually are the questionnaire responses. So these here are the questionnaire open-ended responses. These were not the quantitative, this is not quantitative data, it was presented before this. This is kind of a qualitative data because these are open-ended responses. As I said, I analyzed them thematically as well. So you can see that here, for example, this is what we chose as a way, as an approach to presenting these results. But then, so basically the study was about approaches to EMI, so English medium instruction, how it's approached in different universities, about beliefs about the driving forces of this approach, so why introduce this approach, why universities decide to introduce this approach, and also about attitudes, so general attitudes. How do students and teachers feel about this instructional approach? So here we are moving on to the interview results. As you can see, in terms of approaches to EMI, so how it was approached, so there are different ways how individual institutions approached this instruction. You can see that here, for example, I did not choose to present the results either as a table or a model. So this is kind of something I covered earlier in the video. So sometimes it doesn't make sense to put things like this on the model. there is no, you know, there are no relationships that we're interested in, so no arrows, you know, and anything like that would make sense. So it kind of makes sense just to discuss these approaches here. It's a relatively straightforward topic, so this is what we did, and of course, as I said before, I'm supporting my arguments, my points, the points I'm making, with quotes from the text. Then I move on to the driving forces, which is the second main theme, because it was one of the questions, the research questions, it was about driving forces of EMI. And again, because it wasn't, there wasn't that much data and the responses were quite similar. So again, I felt like doesn't really make that much sense to try to present them in some other way. So basically these two first sections are almost like an introduction to the actual content of these results. So then I move on to the attitudes towards EMI. This was a much more complex theme. So you can see that here, for example, I broke it down into advantages of EMI and challenges of EMI. So this is important, advantages and challenges. These were within the attitudes. So basically, these were representative of the attitudes towards EMI. So here, within the advantages, as you can see, there is a model. There is a model that presents disadvantages because the participants believed in advantages that could be further classified into personal benefits and external benefits. That kind of makes sense to present it in a nice and clear way like we did here. And then I move on to challenges. And these challenges, as you can see, there are two ways in which we present these challenges. So we present these challenges as a table first, and we present these challenges as a model again. As a model, again, it makes sense because you can see there are different types of challenges. And the main reason why it's presented as a table as well is because here, it was a large theme. What I did here before, as you can see, I showed the percentage of interview data that was related to advantages and related to challenges to demonstrate that the participants talked more about challenges than they did about advantages. And this is evident here as well. It's more complex. And here we felt it's important to show differences between the different groups. So what did students say, what did these teachers say, and what did these teachers say? So they are different kinds of teachers. Content staff are just people who, the teachers who present the normal content in a university. And EAP staff are the ones that were concerned with the English language support. So anyway, because here it was so important to see these differences, of course it makes sense to have a table. So as I said in the video, it really depends on your study what you want to show and why you believe it's useful to use a given a given way of presenting the data so before that I didn't use anything at first then I used a model and then I use a model and a table and then after this as you can see I move on to specific challenges that I that I mentioned that I mentioned before so language related and then institutional so the challenges from this model and from this table and then I so so here we have sections about these challenges again I don't I don't have any more I don't present them anymore and in any kind of a in any form of a model it's just text it's just text and as I said you start with defining a given theme you start with saying what these were and then you just give extracts, give evidence from your data. So basically that's the most, that's the easiest way to remember the structure and something I said earlier in this video. You present a theme and then you give evidence and this is what's happening for the remaining themes from this interview. So as you can see and as I said before you can really decide how you want to present the results of your thematic analysis. Sometimes you may decide to include a table. Sometimes you may decide to include some kind of a model or visual representation and sometimes you may decide not to use anything at all. So I hope that you learned something new from this video. If you did, please like the video. It really helps me and helps the video get found on YouTube. If you're new to this channel, consider subscribing and if you have anything else to add or if you have any questions, feel free to post these questions in the comments.