Metatheme Analysis: A Qualitative Method for Cross-Cultural Research

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic and qualitative data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges, but has not yet addressed how thematic analysis can be modified for use in cross-cultural ethnography. Thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative and mixed-methods research, yet is not currently well-adapted to cross-cultural ethnographic designs. We build on existing thematic analysis techniques to discuss a method to inductively identify metathemes (defined here as themes that occur across cultures). Identifying metathemes in cross-cultural research is important because metathemes enable researchers to use systematic comparisons to identify significant patterns in cross-cultural datasets and to describe those patterns in rich, contextually-specific ways. We demonstrate this method with data from a collaborative cross-cultural ethnographic research project (exploring weight-related stigma) that used the same sampling frame, interview protocol, and analytic process in four cross-cultural research sites in Samoa, Paraguay, Japan, and the United States. Detecting metathemes that transcend data collected in different languages, cultures, and sites, we discuss the benefits and challenges of qualitative metatheme analysis.

Fat Is All My Fault: Globalized Metathemes of Body Self‐blame

“…The approach presented here, developed alongside and informed by other comparative multi-sited ethnographic works (e.g., Benton et al 2017;Beresford 2021;Ember 2009;Garth and Hardin 2019;Jordan 1992;Mendenhall 2019;Pacheco-Vega 2020), enables us to identify overarching metathemes and inter-relationships between themes across our datasets. After we finished data collection, we met repeatedly to discuss the themes emerging from our data during analysis, paying particular attention to the identification of, and agreement around, metathemes (Wutich et al 2021). In cross-cultural and multi-sited research, metathemes are broad, over-arching themes that cut across and encompass many smaller site-or culturally specific themes (Bernard et al 2016;Hagaman and Wutich 2017;Ryan and Bernard 2003).…”

“…In this part (Step 1) of the metatheme analysis, we conducted site-specific theme identification. Each of us used a multi-method approach to theme identification, drawing on in-vivo coding, metaphor analysis, idioms and euphemisms, and repetition-based theme analysis (Ryan and Bernard 2003;Wutich et al 2021).…”

“…We conducted a collaborative sorting activity (Ryan and Bernard 2003;Wutich et al 2021) to facilitate the comparison of cross-site themes. Each of us was given the full set of cross-site themes (about 30 per site, or 120 combined) and we each were tasked with integrating these into a smaller set of metathemes.…”

“…Qualitative analysis can include methods for reducing a larger number of finegrained themes into a smaller number of larger-scale themes (Bernard et al 2016;Charmaz 2014;Glaser 1998;Miles and Huberman 1994;Onwuegbuzie 2003;Saldaña 2015;Strauss and Corbin 1997), but these techniques have traditionally not always been conducive to the increasingly common collaborative forms of research that are conducted across multiple nations, cultures, languages, or sites. A broadly applicable research process for identifying metathemes-themes that cut across cultures, languages, and sites (Wutich et al 2021)-could provide medical anthropology with a flexible toolkit that would help us in cross-cultural and multi-sited ethnographic research.…”

The Impact of Product Tagging on Trust and Purchase Intention: A cross-cultural perspective in visual e-commerce

“…A fourth limitation relates to the realism of the experimental design and measuring behavioral intention in consumer research (see discussions by Morales at al., 2017 andWutich et al, 2021). The current study strived to increase external validity by displaying an Instagram post that looked as real as possible within the survey.…”