Demonstrating the Use of Thematic Analysis in Family Research

Thematic Analysis has been defined by Boyatzis (1998) as a process to be used with qualitative information. It is used to describe social phenomena and is a process for encoding qualitative data. Phenomenological studies usually include the use of themes that makes sense of data collected. This article will demonstrate how the Attride-Stirling Thematic Network Analysis was used to examine the corpus obtained from data collected to describe commuter couples in Jos, Nigeria. The Thematic Network Analysis is a web-like-illustration that summarizes the main themes constituting a piece of text (Attride-Stirling, 2011).  The corpus consists of transcripts from semi structured interviews and time diaries. Themes were derived based on research questions and related literature on commuter couples and coded using the Thematic Network Analysis. It is the desire of this paper to demonstrate the rigour applied to the method of data analysis. It aims to stay true to the method used and tools employed. This is painstakingly done to indicate credibility, robustness, trustworthiness and transparency.