Virginia Braun

Virginia Braun (Ginny; she/her they/them) is a Professor in the School of Psychology at Waipapa Taumata Rau/The University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and an Ahurei/Fellow of Te Apārangi The Royal Society of New Zealand. A feminist and critical health psychologist, Ginny teaches around gender, sex and sexuality, and critical health psychology, and researches a wide range of gender, sexuality and health topics. Ginny is most widely known as a qualitative methodological scholar, not least for the development of an approach to thematic analysis with Victoria Clarke – now known as reflexive thematic analysis (www.thematicanalysis.net). Their original 2006 publication is the 3rd most cited paper of the 21st century. Award winning books with Victoria Clarke are Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners (Sage, 2013) – (Translations: Chinese, Hindi, Marathi) – and Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide (Sage, 2022) – (Translations: Polish, Farsi, Greek, Japanese, Turkish, Chinese). They edited (with Debra Gray) Collecting Qualitative Data: A Practical Guide to Textual, Media and Virtual Techniques (Cambridge, 2017) – (Translation: Brazilian Portuguese). Other qualitative scholarship focuses on story completion (www.storycompletion.net) and qualitative surveys, as well as matters of quality.

Keynote Talk: Reflexive Thematic Analysis, Researcher Subjectivity and Quality in Qualitative Research

We exist in a world that is, in many ways, now brimming with possibility for qualitative researchers. When qualitative approaches were unusual, publication and acceptance within a discipline could be key challenges. But as qualitative research – and thematic analysis – have become widely popular, across a range of fields and disciplines, new challenges have become evident. These are question of nature, and quality: what is qualitative research, what values (should) underpin qualitative research, and what really matters for quality? It is here that questions of reflexivity, subjectivity, and knowingness come to the fore. In this talk, I will unpack why and how quality matters – especially for reflexive TA, but also for a wider field of qualitative inquiry – and discuss why situating subjectivity and interpretative positionality at the heart of reflexive (thematic analytic) practice is so important. In outlining why a values-based approach to quality makes sense, I will also trouble the suggestion that genAI can and should be a useful tool for this endeavour.