Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) is a widely used qualitative method for identifying, analysing, and interpreting patterns of shared meaning — called themes — across a dataset. Developed by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, it is theoretically flexible, works across epistemological positions, and foregrounds the researcher's active, interpretive role rather than treating themes as features that simply emerge from data. It differs from older 'codebook' approaches by treating the analyst's subjectivity as a resource rather than a source of bias to be suppressed.