Analysis of interviews

The process of transcription was the first stage of analysis, and allowed me to become familiar with the data. The systematic process of analysis was informed by the guidelines offered by Smith et al. (2009). I was also informed by the messiness of stage one of the research, and created an ‘Excel’ spreadsheet. The transcripts were copied into column one and broken down into data numbers to facilitate cross-referencing. Two further columns were added, one to record the line-by-line analysis

of the text, and the other to record the emergent themes. Smith et al. (2009) suggest starting the analytic process with the ‘richest’ transcript. I decided to work on the transcripts in a chronological order to avoid making an interpretation of what was

‘rich’ before the detailed analytic work had taken place. The process of analysis for each interview is now described.

Each transcript was analysed individually in a detailed way after several readings, to reflect descriptive, linguistic and conceptual aspects of the data. The analysis was informed by the hermeneutics of empathy (Smith, 2008). I focussed on the text rather than on pre-existing theory, and on my interpretation of making sense of the participant making sense of their experience. The analysis reflected a Heideggerian phenomenology which sees “interpretation as inevitable, a basic structure of our being-in-the-world” (Finlay, 2008, p. 8). This was carried out for every line of the transcript, and was informed by the IPA literature (Smith & Osborn, 2007). Figure 4 presents an example of exploratory comments.

Transcript extract Exploratory comments

“I suppose actually you know, she did at times embody the core conditions. You know she was a real, she was very much a warm and caring person so I suppose I definitely got the sense of empathy at times but then it, it all became muddied with these quite strange things that went on” (Emma).

Therapy was confusing. Emma is having an inconsistent experience.

“Muddied” suggests contamination?

What does it mean for Emma to evaluate her experienced therapist in this way? That she is conflicted? That her therapist is not professional?

Figure 4: Transcript extract number 1157 from Emma’s interview

Key to exploratory comments: descriptive comments are in normal text; linguistic comments are in italic type, and conceptual comments are underlined.

After completing the exploratory comments, I developed emergent themes to reflect an understanding of the data. This was a recursive process, and required an analytic shift to working with the exploratory comments rather than the transcript. Appendix 11 provides an example of analysis using an extract from Caroline’s interview. I kept a reflexive diary to record the analytic decisions made. I then created a structure of themes by looking for connections across the emergent themes to represent each participant’s account, and this involved referring to the whole and parts of the text.

The themes were reviewed to check that they were grounded in the participant’s account, and were discussed in supervision. For each participant, themes were then arranged into superordinate themes that captured the experience of dissatisfaction for that particular participant, and a table of superordinate themes and subordinate themes with quotations to support the analysis was compiled (Smith & Osborn, 2007).

I engaged in a process of bracketing during the analysis of the individual transcripts.

In order to minimise being influenced by previous interviews as far as this was possible, a period of one week was left in between analysing each transcript, and each transcript was read all the way through in the first instance to orientate to the participant’s unique experience. After the analysis of each transcript was completed, the ‘Excel’ spreadsheet and the structure of themes were filed and not referred to while analysing the subsequent transcripts to avoid ‘searching’ for what had already been found. As I analysed each transcript, I continually reflected on whether the emergent themes were being created inductively with respect to this transcript (see Appendix 10, examples 7, 8 and 9 for examples of how I used bracketing during the process of analysis).

The final stage of analysis was a cross-case analysis, which involved looking at all themes across all participants to develop a master table of themes. I created a document which listed all 239 themes across the six transcripts and worked through the list renaming themes that had been worded slightly differently, and combining and renaming similar themes. I returned to the transcripts to make sure that the new themes were still grounded in the data. For one-off themes, I checked the transcript and some of these were re-coded. I looked across the transcripts to check whether themes had been missed in other accounts. Themes were discarded if they were not significant and if they did not answer the research question. I organised the data into

superordinate and subordinate themes in order to answer the research question, and reflect the convergence and divergence in participants’ experiences. This process involved combining themes. This process also involved subsumption¹¹, for example,

‘feeling confused’ became a superordinate theme for all cases. The final analysis reflected the temporal nature of the experience of dissatisfaction. The superordinate themes applied to all participants, but the subordinate themes did not. Appendix 12 provides an example of how a superordinate theme was created.