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To say there is a new wave of interest surrounding thematic analysis (TA) would not be an overstatement. The method has gone from being taken-for-granted, commonly deployed, yet poorly described (Braun & Clarke, 2006), to one that seems to be front and centre in texts on qualitative research across a wide range of disciplines (Joffe, 2012; Terry, Hayfield, Clarke, & Braun, 2017). Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke’s approach to TA, which they now describe as a reflexive TA approach (Braun, Clarke, Hayfield, & Terry, 2018), seems to be generating much of this interest.

Not only has TA as an analytic method become more popular, but so too has interest in better understanding demarcations between approaches (including TA’s similarities with its ‘near cousin’content analysis (CA)). A consequence of TA’s ubiquity and its historically fuzzy boundaries with other methods, indeed a lack of recognition that there are …