Thematic content analysis as challenge to big scale methods

 During the last two years I have come to think a lot about method, and how method sometimes blurs what is important in a text. I have, for reasons unknown to me, mostly worked with complex text and context bound methods such as different modes of discourse analysis. However, the texts I am most satisfied with are those I have written based on thematic content analysis, which I during recent years have started to think about as the most underestimated methods.

Let’s start with why I think it is underestimated: it is basically because it does not hold an onthology of its own. For instance Foucaldian based discourse analysis, which is the method I have most experience with, comes with a heavy theoretical luggage. To know how a discourse operates is an achievement in itself. The same can not be said about thematic content analysis. Instead it is very straight forward, were the material guides it’s operation. It is seldom you go into a material without a hunch of what you will encounter. Thereby, you can easily find themes that will be adapted to the material, thereby the empirical standards often sets rule for your inquiry. With Foucauldian analysis, you instead have to adapt the material to your method in that sense that you have pre-determined themes which also can be in the form of a critique.

Content analysis - a useful tool for analysing the nexus 
between text and picture 


In a research project I have had for the past year I have studied the rhetoric used by sexual educator Henrik Hinke Bergegren. In this I have utilised Wodak & Riesgls discoursive model. To some extent it worked, since I could for instance identify which rethoric strategies Bergegen utilised and what lay at the core of his critique. From a more thematic approach I would instead investigate the content rather than the context of what was being said. And perhaps this would have been a more fruitful approach if I were to write that sort of text.

What lays at core here is that perhaps the humanities and social scientist today to a to large degree is obsessed with method. Throughout my career I have seen numerous of students, PhD-candidates and scholar who have fallen into a methodological trap were the method guides inquiry, rather than the other way around. And perhaps this is due to a history of to little method. What I hope to see in the future is a science that however works more eclectic, and acknowledging that sometimes perfection lies in simpleness.

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