Emerging Themes: The Researcher’s Experience

The term “theme ” is a prominent word in the human science researcher’s vocabulary. Without it, it would be difficult to describe what human science researchers do. In dealing with their data, they “search ” for themes, and they “find ” themes, or they “extract, ” “rec ognize, ” or “identify ” them. Most often, however, themes are said to emerge, or they “appear,” “occur, ” “stand out, ” “arise, ” or “reveal themselves. ” It seems odd, not only for control-oriented researchers from positivistic tradi tions, but for most scholars who encounter the notions of human sci ence research for the first time, that something should happen that does not seem to be primarily an action of the researcher. Why do re searchers prefer a more passive, slightly withdrawing, almost myste rious language when they tell about themes? The most direct way of exploring this question is, naturally, to ask 230 researchers what they mean. Several years ago I conducted in-depth interviews with thirteen researchers, mostly doctoral students, about their phenomenological research experience. These dialogues included the issue of emerging themes. Because doctoral students usually describe the data analysis process in some detail in their dis sertations, I examined such descriptions from an additional 20 re searchers. But I also wanted to include experts, that is, scholars who have done more than one such research project or guided their stu dents through them, and who have thoughtfully reflected on the process, or written about it. Therefore, I added pertinent writings to my collection of sources, and I also surveyed a number of researchers whom I knew personally. (I received 11 responses as a result of 19 re quests, see notes.) Thus I had quite a broad data base. Not only was my data base extensive, but it contained many details, colorful anec dotes, and illuminating metaphors, only very few of which I could integrate into this paper. Here the individual accounts are brought together to form an intersubjective description of some of the researcher’s major experiences in the process of making sense of the data. What Are Themes? I had originally intended to look exclusively at the nature of the pro cess of the emergence of themes. However, this proved to be impos sible without gaining some clarity about what researchers mean