Towards Better Reflexive Thematic Analysis in HCI: A Scoping Review of Practice at CHI

Paper Title

Towards Better Reflexive Thematic Analysis in HCI: A Scoping Review of Practice at CHI

Publication Info

• Topic area: Evaluation of Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) practices in HCI research at CHI.
• Keywords: Reflexive Thematic Analysis, HCI, qualitative methods, CHI, research methods, reflexivity, thematic analysis, methodological congruence, qualitative research, reporting standards.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) is widely used in HCI but is often misunderstood and misapplied. Issues include methodological incongruence, insufficient reflexivity, and poor reporting of themes.
• Significance: Misapplication of RTA undermines the quality of qualitative research in HCI, leading to methodological insincerity and potential devaluation of HCI research by other disciplines.
• Motivation and related work: Previous reviews in other fields have highlighted common issues in RTA practice, but no comprehensive study has examined its use across HCI. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing RTA practice in CHI 2025 papers.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A scoping review of 147 CHI 2025 papers purporting to use RTA, evaluated against good practice criteria derived from Braun and Clarke’s guidelines.
• Novelty:
  1. First comprehensive review of RTA practice across HCI at CHI.
  2. Identification of widespread issues and pockets of good practice.
  3. Recommendations for improving RTA practice and selecting appropriate methods in HCI.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Systematic literature search in ACM Digital Library and Scopus.
  • Inclusion of papers meeting criteria for RTA use.
  • Evaluation using a checklist of signifiers for good and poor RTA practice.
  • Analysis of reporting, reflexivity, methodological congruence, and engagement with RTA literature.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 147 papers analyzed; 88% used the exact term "Reflexive Thematic Analysis."
  • 57.1% mentioned researcher positionality; only 19.7% discussed epistemological/ontological positioning.
  • 28.6% used a codebook, 27.9% referenced grounded theory techniques, and 74.8% used positivist terminology.
  • 62.6% provided no project-specific details on the six phases of RTA; only 6.1% described them comprehensively.
  • 61% of papers had unclear theme labeling; only 32% explicitly identified all themes.
• Advantage over baselines: Highlights specific areas of poor practice and provides actionable recommendations for improvement, unlike prior general critiques of RTA in HCI.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Corpus of 147 CHI 2025 papers.
  • Evaluation based on descriptive statistics and qualitative examples.
  • Metrics: adherence to RTA guidelines, clarity of reporting, reflexivity, and methodological congruence.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited to CHI 2025 papers; findings may not generalize to other venues or years.
  • Broad-brush analysis may lack nuance.
  • Future work could explore RTA practices in other HCI subfields and longitudinal trends.

Summary

This paper provides a scoping review of Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) practices in 147 CHI 2025 papers, revealing widespread issues such as insufficient reflexivity, poor reporting, and methodological incongruence. While pockets of good practice were identified, most papers failed to fully engage with RTA’s theoretical underpinnings. The authors recommend deeper engagement with RTA literature, better alignment of methods with research goals, and improved transparency in reporting. These findings aim to catalyze better RTA practices in HCI, ensuring richer and more coherent qualitative research.