‘A starting point for your journey, not a map’: Nikki Hayfield in conversation with Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke about thematic analysis

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes on contributors

Virginia Braun

Virginia Braun is a Professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Auckland, Āotearoa/New Zealand. She is a feminist and critical (health) psychologist, and her research explores the intersecting areas of gender, bodies, sex/sexuality, health, and (now) food. She also has an ongoing interest in qualitative research and (with Victoria Clarke) wrote the award-winning textbook Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners (SAGE). They have written extensively on thematic analysis (including with Nikki Hayfield), and are finishing a new book, Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide, for SAGE. She co-edited Collecting Qualitative Data (Cambridge University Press) with Victoria and Debra Gray – which introduces a range of methods for collecting qualitative data beyond the widely-used interview or focus group – and is interested in other methods like qualitative story completion. She is on twitter.

Victoria Clarke

Victoria Clarke is an Associate Professor of Qualitative and Critical Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Her research interests focus on the intersecting areas of sexuality and gender, appearance and embodiment, and family and relationships. With Virginia Braun and others, including Nikki Hayfield, she has written extensively about thematic analysis and is currently co-authoring a book on thematic analysis for SAGE. Her other books including Successful Qualitative Research (SAGE) and Collecting Qualitative Data (Cambridge). She also has a particular interest in developing survey and story completion methods for qualitative research, and recently created a story completion website with Virginia, Nikki and others (https://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/research-groups/story-completion.html). You can follow her on Twitter where she regularly tweets about thematic analysis and qualitative research.

Nikki Hayfield

Nikki Hayfield is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK. Nikki teaches about and supervises students using qualitative methods including thematic analysis. She has written several book chapters about thematic analysis with Victoria Clarke, Virginia Braun and with Gareth Terry. She is currently co-authoring a book on Thematic Analysis with Gareth as part of an American Psychological Association (APA) series on qualitative methods. She continues to use thematic analysis in her research which is mainly around sexualities. You can follow Nikki on ResearchGate or via her UWE page (https://people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/Nikki2Hayfield).