Thematic expansion: A new strategy for theory development

Abstract

We developed and applied metasynthesis methods to expand previously reported thematic descriptions of parents’ internal definition of “being a good parent to my seriously ill child” as part of a larger study to examine parenting of children with serious illness. Our systematic approach included: literature search, purposeful selection of grounded theories regarding parenting a seriously ill child, study summaries, mapping evidence of good parent themes onto structural elements of grounded theory, cross-study comparisons, and theoretical memoing to summarize analytic insights. Twenty-five grounded theory studies from 32 reviewed reports reflected multiple conditions (n=5), countries (n=10) and family members (n=386 families). We report a worked example of the processes used to extend the original good parent themes and detail our processes through one good parent theme. The methods we describe are a promising approach to extend thematic analysis findings and advance thematic expansions toward development of more formal theoretical syntheses.