Virginia Braun


Virginia "Ginny" Braun is a New Zealand psychology academic specialising in thematic analysis and gender studies. She is particularly known for her scholarship on the social construction of the vagina and designer vagina cosmetic surgery, body hair and heterosexuality. She is perhaps best known for her collaboration with British psychologist Victoria Clarke around thematic analysis and qualitative research methods. Together they have published numerous papers, chapters, commentaries and editorials on thematic analysis and qualitative research, and an award-winning and best selling qualitative textbook entitled . They have a at The University of Auckland. More recently - with the - they have published around the story completion method.

Academic career

After undergraduate and masters studies in psychology at the University of Auckland, Braun received a Commonwealth Scholarship to Loughborough University with Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson as her advisors for her 2000 thesis - The vagina: An analysis].
Braun returned to as a lecturer in psychology Auckland in 2001, rising to full Professor in 2017.
Her 2006 paper "Using thematic analysis in psychology" with Victoria Clarke in Qualitative Research in Psychology has more than 59,000 citations according to Google Scholar. It is also - according to Google Scholar - the most cited academic paper published in 2006.
Braun was editor of Feminism & Psychology between 2008 and 2013. She received a Distinguished Leadership Award from the American Psychological Association's Committee on Women in Psychology in 2013.
In 2015/2016 Braun went public with her experiences seeking a tubal ligation.

Areas of expertise