Sample Summary of the Digital Health Research Lab Protocol for Thematic Analysis of Co‑Design Research Data

Prepared by Bronwin Patrickson in consultation with members of the Digital Health Research Lab

This document provides a comprehensive summary of the Digital Health Research Lab’s protocol for conducting thematic analysis of co‑design research data.

At its core, the protocol is concerned with how rich, collaborative qualitative data—generated through co‑design processes—can be analysed in ways that are both methodologically rigorous and practically meaningful. …

THEMATIC CODING PROTOCOL

1. Authorised Access
   • All coders to be named and added to the ethics protocol prior to data review to ensure that they have authorised access to the data.
   • Check all UX Designers and Developers and team members involved in the co-design process are also named in the protocol.

2. Research
   Researchers new to thematic coding are recommended to read Section 3 of Braun and Clarke’s (2013) instructional text book, Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners

3. Identify and apply theoretical frameworks

• First check the theoretical frameworks outlined in your co-design study protocol to ensure alignment.

• Additionally, please note (as discussed in Braun and Clarke) thematic coding is often undertaken using a combination of discourse analysis and grounded theory.

• Discourse analysis “involves a focus upon the sociocultural and political context in which text and talk occur. Discourse analysis is, above all, concerned with a critical analysis of the use of language and the reproduction of dominant ideologies (belief systems) in discourse (defined here as a group of ideas or patterned way of thinking which can both be identified in textual and verbal communications and located in wider social structures). Discourse analysis adds a linguistic approach to an understanding of the relationship between language and ideology, exploring the way in which theories of reality and relations of power are encoded in such aspects as the syntax, style and rhetorical devices used in texts.

• Grounded theory sets out to discover or construct theory from data, systematically obtained and analysed using comparative analysis. While grounded theory is inherently flexible, it is a complex methodology.

In practice, this generally means that additional theoretical frameworks are only applied after an initial engagement with the data itself, in order to enable the meaning of that data to emerge from the ground up. However, increasingly digital health researchers do employ some wayfinding frameworks to help them analyse the data, so depending upon the aims and focus of your study you have the option to also consider the frameworks suggested below (at least in brief) as part of your process either before, or after your first analysis phase.