Reflexive Thematic Analysis of Researcher Identity in Vocational Higher Education

This empirical study with methodological reflection examines how postgraduate research education shaped six lecturers’ researcher, academic, and professional identities within a Vocational and Professional Higher Education and Training (VPET) institution whose provision extends through Level 8. It also examines what the study demonstrates about conducting Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) as a practitioner-researcher in an institutionally bounded setting. Six purposively selected lecturers participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The dataset was analysed through Braun and Clarke’s reflexive approach, with MAXQDA 2022 (VERBI Software) supporting transcript organisation, coding, memoing, retrieval, comparison of coded segments, and iterative review of developing themes. The analysis generated four interpretive themes: research engagement as identity transformation; conditions that enable researcher-becoming; ambivalence, workload and constraint; and research culture as relational infrastructure. Participants described growing methodological confidence, stronger identification as researchers, and greater capacity to support students, while also negotiating time, workload, competing responsibilities, and uneven structural support. Methodologically, the study demonstrates that RTA requires explicit attention to researcher positionality, relational ethics, deductive identifiability, and the distinction between software-supported data management and interpretive theme generation. A worked analytic pathway makes the movement from participant excerpts to codes, and final themes visible without treating themes as emergent rather than generated. The methodological reflection further explains why sample adequacy is better reasoned through information power and analytic depth than through saturation claims in this form of thematic analysis. The article concludes with transferable guidance for practitioner-researchers conducting reflexive, ethically attentive RTA in vocational higher education and similarly bounded professional settings.