Qualitative Analysis in Gay Men's Health Research: Comparing Thematic, Critical Discourse, and Conversation Analysis

Abstract

Gay men's health typically relies on traditional forms of qualitative analysis, such as thematic analysis, and would benefit from a diversity of analytic approaches. Such diversity offers public health researchers a breadth of tools to address different kinds of research questions and, thus, substantiate different types of social phenomenon relevant to the health and wellbeing of gay men. In this article, I compare and contrast three qualitative analytic approaches: thematic, critical discourse, and conversation analysis. I demonstrate and distinguish their key analytic assumptions by applying each approach to a single data excerpt taken from a public health interview conducted for a broader study on gay men's health. I engage in a discussion of each approach in relation to three themes: its utility for gay men's health, its approach to dilemmas of voice, and its capacity for reflexivity. I advocate that qualitative researchers should capitalise on the full range of qualitative analytic approaches to achieve the goals of gay men's health. However, I specifically encourage qualitative researchers to engage with conversation analysis, not only because of its capacity to resolve dilemmas of voice and to achieve reflexivity, but also for its ability to capture forms of social life hitherto undocumented through thematic and critical discourse analysis.

Keywords:

• gay men's health
• qualitative methodology
• thematic analysis
• critical discourse analysis
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgments

Parts of this paper were presented at the 28th Annual Qualitative Analysis Conference, Brantford, Canada and the 14th Annual Ontario HIV Treatment Network Research Conference, Toronto, Canada. The Ontario HIV Treatment Network funded collection of the data used in this article. I am thankful for feedback from Tanya Romaniuk and Linda Quirke on early versions of this article. Any errors are, of course, my own.

Notes

1. I note the apparent inconsistencies in the use of these labels in the health literature. For example, Wilkinson (2000) would label as thematic or content analysis what I describe as CDA; what she describes as discursive analysis, I characterize as CA. Still further, some discourse analysts have begun to draw more heavily on the empirical findings of CA. For my article, I demarcate these three approaches by their analytic goal and the assumptions on which those goals are based.

2. In this article, particular attention is given to spoken data. While thematic and CDA can be applied to textual data (e.g., newspaper articles, policy documents), CA is only applicable to talk-in-interaction.

3. The study, The Dual Risk/Desired Effects Study (Myers et al., 2004), involved 27 in-depth qualitative interviews with self-identified gay or bisexual men from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

4. I thank Tanya Romaniuk for this observation.