Thematic Analysis Team Challenge
Today your team will analyse two real customer interviews about product placement using thematic analysis — open coding, axial coding, theme development, and discussion — while competing live against the other teams in the room.
Pick your team to begin
Your choice is remembered on this device — reloading keeps you on your team.
Enter your name first, then pick a team.
Running the session?
Open the read-only live leaderboard — no team data entry, safe for the projector.
Case brief
Exclusive Inc is a US-based online clothing brand and store, started in 2010, with roughly 200 employees and $56 million in annual sales last year. The company is expanding to Australia and wants to know whether its most effective US strategy — product placement in popular sitcoms — will work here. Your team has been engaged to research the effectiveness of product placement in the Australian market.
About this exercise
This activity walks through thematic analysis in four stages: open coding and axial coding (terms borrowed from grounded theory) get you from raw transcript to organised categories, then theme development and discussion are where the actual thematic analysis happens — defining themes, checking they hold up against the evidence, and interpreting what they mean for Exclusive Inc.
How scoring works
- Open coding: 2 points per code you create, capped at 20 codes (max 40 points).
- Axial coding: 5 points per category that contains 2 or more codes.
- Themes: 15 points per theme that has a name, an explanation of 10+ words, AND at least one code/category selected as evidence.
- Theme review (optional): +3 points per theme if you note (8+ words) whether it holds up against contradicting evidence.
- Discussion: 8 points per question answered with 15+ characters.
Your score updates automatically as you work — there's no submit button. Head to the Leaderboard tab any time to see how your team compares live.
Open coding
0 codes assignedWhat is open coding? It means labelling small chunks of text — usually a sentence — with a short descriptive code that names what's being said, close to the participant's own words. No interpretation yet, just noticing and naming.
Read both interviews below. Click any answer sentence to tag it with a short code.
Axial coding
What is axial coding? It means looking across the codes you've created and grouping the ones that share an underlying idea into categories. This is where you start noticing patterns and relationships between codes, rather than treating each one in isolation.
Drag codes from the pool into a category. Rename, delete, or add categories as your analysis develops.
Code pool
Theme development
What is a theme? A theme is a broader, meaningful pattern built from one or more of your categories — it captures how and why something happens, not just what was said. A good theme could be explained to someone who hasn't read the transcripts and still make sense.
Identify 2–3 themes. Focus on how and why product placement influences consumers — not just what participants said.
Discussion questions
Live leaderboard
Scoring: 2 pts/code (max 20 codes) · 5 pts/category with 2+ codes · 15 pts/theme with a name, 10+ word explanation, and linked evidence · +3 pts/theme for an 8+ word review note · 8 pts/discussion answer of 15+ characters.