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Chapter 3. Research Methodology Adoption, Diffusion and Use of E-government
Hassan Al-Zaabi Services in Abu Dhabi Police Force
interesting or not. Further, as given earlier the thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative research;
therefore, it is considered a reliable approach. Table 3.6 give some reasons why thematic analysis is
widely used.
Relatively easy and quick method to learn and do.
Advantages of Thematic Analysis
Accessible to researchers with little or no experience of qualitative research.
Can usefully summarise key features of a large body of data and offer a thick description of the data set
(data set is all the data gathered to be used for a specific analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006)).
Can highlight similarities and differences across the data set.
Can be useful for producing qualitative analyses suited to informing policy development.
Table 3.6: Advantages of thematic analysis (Source: Braun and Clarke, 2006: 97)
The advantage of using codes when describing text is to, easily “retrieve and organise the data” (Miles
and Huberman, 1994: 57). Themes “capture something important about the data in relation to the
research question. A theme might be given considerable space in some data items, and little or none in
others, or it might appear in relatively little of the data set. So researcher judgement is necessary to
determine what a theme is” (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 87). In literature researchers “often use the terms
concept, category and theme interchangeably” (Bazeley, 2009: 6).
Codes and themes can be identified based on literature and a specific research question (similar to this
research, and called theoretical thematic analysis) or data driven (similar to grounded theory, and
called inductive thematic analysis) (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Furthermore, the theoretical thematic
analysis will keep the researcher aiming the research question: “identifying and understanding factors
affecting the adoption and use of e-services in a public sector organisation in a developing country”,
therefore, focusing on gathered data and the relation to the theoretical framework.
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