Regardless of which tool you use (software, journaling, or affinity diagraming), the act of conducting a thematic analysis can be broken down into 6 steps.

A thematic analysis involves 6 different phases: gathering the data, reading all the data from beginning to end, coding the text based on what it’s about, creating new codes that encapsulate candidate themes, taking a break and coming back to the analysis later, and evaluating your themes for good fit.

Step 1: Gather All Your Data

Start with the raw data, such as interview or focus-group transcripts, field notes, or diary study entries. I recommended transcribing audio recordings from interviews and using the transcriptions for analysis instead of relying on patchy memory.

Step 2: Read All Your Data from Beginning to End

Familiarize yourself with the data before you begin the analysis, even if you were the one to perform the research. Read all your transcripts, field notes, and other data sources before analyzing them. At this step, you can involve your team in the project. Involving your team instills knowledge of users and empathy for them and their needs.

Run a workshop (or a series of workshops if your team is very large or you have a lot of data). Follow these steps:

1. Before your team members engage with the data, write your research questions on a whiteboard or piece of flipchart paper in order to make the questions easy to refer to while working.
2. Give each member a transcript or one field- or diary-study entry. Tell people to highlight anything they think is important.
3. Once team members have completed reading their entries, they can pass their transcript or entry to someone else and receive a new one from another team member. This step is repeated until all team members have engaged with all the data.
4. Discuss as a group what you noticed or found surprising.

A workshop where each team member reads each diary- or field-study entry and highlights important bits is a good way of getting team members to actively engage with the text, as opposed to just reading it and letting it wash over them.

While it’s best if your team observes all your research sessions, that may not be possible if you have a lot of sessions or a big team. When individual team members observe only a handful of sessions, they sometimes walk away with an incomplete understanding of the findings. The workshop can solve that problem, since everyone will read all the session transcripts.

Step 3: Code the Text Based on What It’s About

In the coding step, highlighted sections need to be categorized so that the highlighted sections can be easily compared.

At this stage, remind yourself of your research objectives. Print your research questions out. Stick them up on a wall or on a whiteboard in the room where you’re conducting the analysis.